Sadly Google Lively is no more. What we need in this industry is more competitors not less. Through competition we’ll find the best feature set for users. As I tell my friends, even if they may not see it, virtual worlds are in every one’s future. Even though it’s difficult to boil down everything they offer into a succinct value proposition, as the technology improves more developers and users will gravitate to virtual worlds for their unique capabilities. Mainstream video games made a similar transition from 2D to 3D, the same will be true for virtual worlds. Not everything will transition of course, just as some 2D games are still viable today. But web applications that are particularly suited for 3D, and more, will transition. And beyond that, virtual worlds will launch things we can’t even imagine today. The future looks very bright to me.
So why did Google shut down Lively? I was actually a bit shocked they did, I thought they would simply let it flounder about for years as they have done with Orkut. I was never that impressed by Lively until I spent some time with some Lively users trying to persuade Google to keep it going. But why shut it down after just 4 months?
True it wasn’t core to Google business, but I disagree with Rick Turoczy that Lively simply didn’t offer Google any relevant data.
I think we can take Ockham’s Razor to this one. Because I think the answer is quite simple: It seemed like a good idea at the time. But, in actuality, Lively didn’t offer Google any relevant data. And that, ultimately, is what killed Lively.
If virtual worlds offer anything it’s data. Most web sites gather mountains of data but it’s utilitarian in nature. You can learn how people shop, how they find information, etc. Facebook may help you categorize people. But few sites dive into who a person is and what they find entertaining. Of course that is more wishful thinking as few people today live in virtual worlds and their functionality is limited. Google Lively probably generated no more pertinent data than a basic chat room. But if it was allowed to develop further I have no doubt that Google would have found incredibly valuable data.
I think Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins was closer to an answer in his post, That Was Quick: Google Shuts Lively Down.
like the inability to police the service in the manner they planned
Questionable content is a huge problem across the Internet. Advertisers simply don’t want their ads showing up next to porn. I’ve worked at GeoCities and Yahoo!, abuse was probably our biggest consideration in building new products and features. Google being Google though, they probably thought they had a way to skirt around the problem. When that proved wrong their gumption for the whole thing soured. They already have their hands full with questionable content on YouTube.
However I think their hubris only hides a fact that Stan Schroeder raised - Google is not good at building communities:
Perhaps it’s still too early to tell, but if you add Orkut - Google’s social network which is arguably doing well, but also hasn’t done anything revolutionary lately – to the mix, it becomes fairly obvious that Google is not good at building communities. One more reason to bet on Facebook one day being bigger than Google, if you’re the betting type.
In the end though, if this was 2007 Google would not have cut Lively. It’s only because of the economic implosion that Google has is reevaluating many of their lab projects and I doubt Lively will be the last to go. When Google looks at itself in the mirror they will see a search engine, not a builder of communities.
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Absolutely fair point. In retrospect, maybe that "any data" should have been phrased as "enough data." Granted, Lively offered some data. Just not enough to make it worth Google's while.
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