Google's Lively to Turn Lifeless

Google opened its own virtual world, Lively, in July. Unfortunately, not everything Google does turns gold. And at the end of the December, Lively will become lifeless.

The Google Lively Team announced the decision in a brief blog post.

"Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it's the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people's lives. But we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off," the team's official announcement said, "It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business."

Lively used browser plug-ins for IE and Firefox; users could create "rooms" on their own sites and interact using avatars. But unlike the popular Second Life, you couldn't do much more than that.

And that was pointed out by The Economist when they declared Lively a flop after only a month.

Why has it been such a flop? “There’s nothing to do in Lively if you’re not talking to someone,” says Greg Lastowka, an expert on virtual worlds at Rutgers School of Law in New Jersey. Second Life, he says, offers “commerce and creativity”, and Club Penguin (a popular virtual world for children, owned by Disney) has lots of built-in games.

Whoever owns the last "room" in existence in December, please turn out the lights.