Impact of Google Lively

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Permalink Reply by Ilene Frank on July 10, 2008 at 10:49am

Of course Google's always the company to watch - but really! My first reaction to Lively is that it's remarkably unsophisticated. I was disappointed. I also tried Vivaty via Facebook and I liked it somewhat better though both of them managed to crash my computer in short order. I suppose they'll catch up, but... I wonder if some of these very very basic virtual environments will actually drive more users to Second Life where you can create your own content.

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Permalink Reply by Omind on July 10, 2008 at 1:56pm

I think there will be content creation for Vivaty somewhere down the road. There is already for ExitReality. Goggle Lively and the others seem to be 'more of the same' to me and there is a BIG difference between the SL/Kaneva/Blaxxun experience where the invironment is more immesvive and these embedded little programs that run on the page. With Google Lively, however, you can separate the window and it becomes more of a stand-alone program. Then you can visit another place while you other window is still open, pretty slick, IMO

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Permalink Reply by Gabriel Paci (Master Quatro) on July 10, 2008 at 2:09pm

The cartoon - simple graphics of Lively are hardly a contender. Google is testing the waters. They will make a major aquisition should this experiment prove successful according to the metrics they have set. Second Life's economy is unmatched and won't be equaled soon. It's hard enough to reproduce the user content driven environment of SL, where everyone is given the tools to be an artist, a builder, a programmer, a musician etc.; to match the vibrant economy with an established currency and exchange rate. The IBM collaboration got Google's attention. I'm sure Google's corporate intelligence knew of the Linden-IBM discussions. It's no secret that IBM has had increased interest in SL since they tested it's use as an employee networking tool almost 2 years ago. Google is not about to engage in 2 wars - Microsoft & IBM .. or are they?

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Permalink Reply by Benjamin on July 11, 2008 at 2:23am

This move have positive and negative impacts, some have been highlighted in the discussion:

+ Legitimizes the industry (that has been badly impacted by SL's "sex scandal" or stereotyped as kid's stuff with Habbo or Club Penguin)
+ Give visibility to 3D environments

- Threat to existing 3D chat guys (IMVU, Habbo, There, others)
- Grab mindshare (so instead of hearing "how different are you from SL?" you will hear "how different are you from Lively?" - though it sounds better to be compared to Google :-) )

From hearsay, the top Google dudes (and likely this project team) have all read history (Howard Rheingold books, Snow Crash, etc.) and know about history (LambdaMoo, CommuniTree, Habitat, etc.) so they know the pitfalls of VW. Sex is the obvious first item, but there are many other things that make communities and VW self-destruct. Basically, they have done their homework and know history - something many of the new VW guys who are mostly engineers and not sociologists don't know (SL?).

My opinion is that Google did a nice job at making things easy (nice difference from SL), simple but effective avatars and 3D, all in the browser ("web as a desktop" or "web as OS" is getting closer) and is using Lively as a lab for the next wave to come.

Benjamin @ +8*

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Permalink Reply by Miranda on July 12, 2008 at 4:28pm

They certainly are engineers rather than clothes designers, that much is saliently obvious.

This product needs content creation from users, or it will not succeed, in my opinion.

I know that several content creators with work on other sites have been approached in regard to this project.

Allowing ' just anyone' to contribute might, however, prove counter productive.

Other 3D chat programs have had difficulties controlling the content made by third parties, which have led to issues later in the expansion of the project.

Properly policing third party content to ensure that users, particularly those below the age of majority, are not exposed to sexual or violent content represents a huge undertaking and allocation of resources..

I'd imagine Google will be fully aware of this and will aim to nip in the bud the issues that can arise from inappropriate third party content being held on the company's servers that have plagued other, similar applications.

MM

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Permalink Reply by Gabriel Paci (Master Quatro) on July 12, 2008 at 5:44pm

This certainly is a "lively" discussion ...

(sowwy - had to say that)

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Permalink Reply by Peter Quirk on August 3, 2008 at 4:57pm

Google's primary focus is indexing the world (content, people, places, relationships, communications) so it can sell targeted advertising. How does Lively fit into this scheme?

Have you noticed how your avatar moves in response to your your chat input? Just say, "Hi" or "Hello" and the silly thing starts waving. I think Google will be doing deep semantic analysis on Lively chat to get at instantaneous mood information, and mining the Lively relationships to get a deeper understanding of how you relate to someone else beyond just knowing them and communicating with them N times a day.

It's probably not a coincidence that the XMPP protocol used in Google's Jabber was extended a while back to include mood messaging. Watch for more sophisticated advertising based on how your mood affects your susceptibility to an ad.

I also think that it might not be in Google's best interests to introduce voice chat unless they can roll out highly scalable voice recognition (or at least mood detection) to their VoiP platform. On the other hand, they may decide to make a Vodaphone-like play (see their Vodaphones InsideOut offering) with their Grand Central unified communications platform and link your Lively voice sessions to the phone networks.

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