Google makes good on virtual world promises, launches Lively : Tech Digest

Social Networking, Virtual Worlds - both expressions that set dollar signs glinting in any media corporation's mind. We've been hearing for a while that Google was planning its own answer to Second Life and so yesterday, just after lunch, it went ahead and launched one. I know; it's like they don't even have a PR department.

The service is called Lively. Google kindly provided a low definition, slightly jerky video of it, saving us the bother of recording our own footage:

You can check out more info and download the client here. This take on Virtual world interaction differs quite significantly from existing ones. Rather than having a single persistent online space, Google intends Lively to be more of an addition to existing web space. User can enter a Lively space from a blog or website and then interact with fellow users, chat and prance about making daft emotes.

Engineering Manager, Niniane Wang, writes on the announcement blog post "If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose."

Character customisation is, of course, absolutely paramount to this endeavour. It simply isn't a virtual world unless someone is dressed a gender-confused pirate with a glandular disorder. Lively's avatars have opted for something a bit more wacky than other existing services, with an art style looking something like Bratz-dolls-meet-disenfranchised-Animal-Crossing-characters.

"Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions," says Wang. "In our user research, we've been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text "[[hug]]"."

But it's nowhere near a poignant as being told "Stop talking to me", "That's not appropriate" and "I'm calling my boyfriend" by a proper animated virtual character instead of just on a boring old email.

At the moment, this is very much in a beta stage, hence the underwhelming announcement, presumably. And currently there aren't a hell of a lot of Lively spaces to visit and those that are available are mostly populated by new users learning the ropes and wandering round like lost tourists. But I think that's really the most fun bit, and it gets much less interesting when everyone knows what the hell they're doing and has mastered all the interesting command keys that I want to learn.

So far, apart from allowing you to create your own customised space and character, the only other exciting feature is the ability to play YouTube videos in virtual TVs in the Lively space. You can also embed pictures in picture frames. However, as the service picks up, you can guarantee that many more will become available. Google's own estimate is that the service is a just a bare 20% complete. Can we call it web 2.5 yet? Pleeeeease?

Lively