Lively from Google Given Shutdown Date

Posted Friday 21st November 2008 by Tobias in SEM News.

Just over four months since it was launched in July this year, Google’s 3-D interactive virtual experience Lively, is set to cancelled on the 31st December 2008. The Lively website states, “After careful consideration, we have decided to shut down Lively.” The reason provided on the official Google blog is that the search engine leviathan wants to focus more on their core “ads and apps” business; could this be a sign that even Google is having to tighten their belts?

When it was launched in July, Lively claimed it was adding a new, third dimension to Google’s online social networking capabilities. The concept was an answer to the interactive virtual world Second Life launched in 2003 by Linden Labs which had proven to be extremely popular as a form of online multimedia interactive networking.

Google have stated that they are continuously involved with innovative experimentation and some of those experiments do not work out, however after the mediocre success of Jaiku  [the realtime social messaging utility] and Orkut  [Google's own social network] some industry commentators are suggesting that this is a sign of Google’s inability to succeed in the social networking and community sectors.

There was a general consensus that Lively was not offering anything innovative when compared with Second Life and its closure is not a massive surprise. Google search, Google maps and Gmail are examples of where an innovative approach to pre-existing popular products has succeeded, however with Lively there was a lack of technological and marketing innovation which many believe to be the source of its failure.  The official Google blog advised that all work is captured before the end of the year.

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