Google Lively shuts down December 31 2008
November 20, 2008 12:49 pm
Starting December 31, 2008 Google’s Lively will be shut down. Rooms and avatars will not be available. Embedded rooms in blogs and other web pages will continue to show an image, but users will no longer be able to enter Lively rooms and interact. I hope nobody was planning on celebrating New Year’s Eve in Lively? ;)
From the Official Google Blog:
In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. 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.
That’s why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. 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.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.
We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms. Thank you for sharing this experience with us. We’ve learned a lot about how users interact in rich social environments, and we hope you’ve enjoyed your time with Lively.
Posted by The Lively Team
I wonder, though luck for the content creators that started to spend a large amount of time experimenting with Google’s Lively? Wasn’t ‘Lively’ not err.. lively enough? Not enough interest as sex & flirting was not allowed in Lively? :D And err, is this one less competition for Second Life, or a large bunch of people that now will not get interested in the concept of ‘3D worlds’ in the first few years? :/
Hat Tip: via Kris Constellation, still alive! ;)
6 Responses to “Google Lively shuts down December 31 2008”
I just say, thank goodness I have one less site to try to master, just in case it becomes the next killer app and replaces everyone else. I belong to too may things and I’m trying to weed them. I like it best when one gets weeded out for me.
/me is off to happily delete her very minor content, and uninstall one more piece of useless software off my computer. One more step forward to simplifying my online life and organizing my computer.
Maybe you’re right–it wasn’t “lively” enough for Google to want to continue it. Second Life has been relatively successful but even SL isn’t widespread enough for it to be something everyone has heard of; most of the people I know probably haven’t heard of SL, let alone Lively. When 3-D worlds become more widespread and popular–and possibly more integrated with the rest of the web–maybe it’ll be more viable.
For my part, I’m a little glad that there’s a little less competition. I haven’t tried any of the other 3-D worlds out there other than Second Life, but I feel invested in SL, having purchased things in-world and having spent so much time there already. That’s not a bad thing, is it?
Good riddance to bad rubbish. At least they realized they had no idea what they were doing and gave up that idiot program.
As I actually own stock in Google, I care about what they do. Abandoning this halfhearted incompetent project has zero impact on their bottom line. And stock in Google even after this catastrophic crash is still more valuable and more liquid than owning LL sims. Or options on a Linden Lab IPO.
This incipient deflationary depression, on the other hand…
I spent a good solid week in Lively. IMHO it was a playground for men to harass women. I even saw several YouTube videos that depicted a male avatar beating female avatars and taking great glory in the action. Dreadful stuff!
Violence encouraged while sexual chat discouraged. Typical.
I emailed the man in charge of Google Lively and they promptly chased the offender off YouTube.
I say good riddance.
Google should concentrate on Google Earth. A much more serious and useful project.
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