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Interactive 3-D chat room created using Google's new Lively site by tech writer Mike Elgan.

Google's new Lively offers virtual chatrooms on the Web, launched yesterday as a teenspace but perhaps born to host virtual meetings and small press conferences.

It looks a bit like a small Second Life without all the shwag for sale. And it's on the Web, embeddable on your own site, rather than parallel to it as a separate, private world -- although you do have to download a small browser plugin to participate. For now, it's only for Windows.

Stephen Shankland at Webware tried Lively, and notes (With Lively, Google tries its own 'Second Life'),

...Integration with the ordinary Internet takes several forms. For one thing, you can pipe in content hosted elsewhere on the Internet, including photos or videos. For another, you can embed your Lively area into your blog or, using widgets Google has written, on MySpace and Facebook Web pages. And you can e-mail your friends a normal Web address to get them to join.

With Lively, you can set up you own online spaces--rooms, grassy meadows, desert islands, or, in the demo version I tried, simulated Silicon Valley office parks. You can change the clothing or form of your avatar (that's your online incarnation, for those of you who missed the Second Life hype). And of course you can chat, do backflips, shake hands, and give high-fives.

To give you the idea, here are thumbnails of the Popular Rooms created by users so far.

NYT (Google Introduces a Cartoonlike Method for Talking in Chat Rooms):

...Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another. (Text appears as cartoon-style bubbles atop the avatars.) Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google's photo service, as if they were pieces of art....

...Mark Kingdon, chief executive of Linden Labs, said Second Life's value was not just in 3-D chat but also in more elaborate environments where people can work, play, teach, and buy and sell virtual products. "Users are highly motivated to create and transact in Second Life to the tune of almost a million dollars a day in user-to-user transactions," Mr. Kingdon said.

That market is actually the buzzkill about Second Life, to me.

Webware's Shankland:

...A few other differences from Second Life: Lively doesn't have money. It's designed to be easier to use, with a drag-and-drop interface. And it's not programmable, at least yet, so you can only select furniture, clothes, hairstyles, and such from the prefabricated catalog Google supplies....

...Money and programmability are both items the company is seriously considering, though... A Mac OS X client also is a high priority....

Programmability, yes. (Can I Create Content?).

But money would skew it. I don't want to buy real estate and build a house here. I'm interested in gathering some folks together in realtime to make history, or at least news.

Small professional groups -- where I think this would shine -- wouldn't spend enough to make it a useful business model. Yet I can see how it's limited to 20 users -- how many speech balloons can chatter at once before nobody's reading any more?

Shankland, predictably, finds these social spaces less appealing than actual facetime, which suggests Lively's real mission. When facetime isn't possible -- and with more photorealistic avatars than these -- I can imagine Lively rooms used to Webcast virtual press conferences.

Farflung staffs could meet in an online replica of the office conference room at appointed times, represented by images of themselves and their own typed words.

Mike Elgan is all over this last:concept (Why Google's 'Lively' is great for telecommuters) at ComputerWorld:

Remember the date: July 8, 2008. Today is the day virtual worlds go mainstream. The reason is that Google has launched its own 3D virtual world called Lively. It's free. And it changes everything. Especially for telecommuters.

The current iteration of Lively seems to border on the goofy and cartoonish. But eventually, it's likely that Google's virtual world will become mainstream to the point where enterprises actually conduct real business there...
Like instant messaging and social networking, Lively will probably start out as a trendy hangout for teens, only later to become indispensable for professionals first for internal communication, then later to replace some business travel and even trade shows and the like.

Like so many Google initiatives, Lively is extensible. It's a platform. So not only can users customize, but third-party companies can build "spaces" -- environments in which avatars can interact. (A company called Rivers Run Red has already announced the development of such spaces.)

Although Lively requires a downloadable browser plug-in, the virtual rooms can exist on Web pages or within social networking sites like Facebook. (Besides Google's backing, this is the other reason why Lively will succeed where Second Life did not -- you'll actually start stumbling across Lively rooms all over the place.) And it's integrated with existing sites in other ways, too. You'll be able to watch YouTube videos within Lively Rooms, or import pictures from photo-sharing sites to decorate the walls of your virtual rooms.

What that means is that companies will be able to re-create their office and meeting space, and events companies can create or re-create entire conferencing facilities...

Elgan built a restrained room at his personal blog, The Raw Feed. He might have chosen a goth theme, a desert island, a chess room (lifesize avatars as chess pieces) or, in the section of "raw shells" in which to build your space, foreseen a hint of things to come: One of the available prefab empty rooms contains a fashion runway.

Check out Lively here. Getting Started Guide

 Tags  google

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1 Comments

Google Lively said:

I can imagine how powerful it could be if it had google maps functionality and if Google ran search and advertisements through the system.

Link | July 9, 2008 2:35 PM
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