Lively addition to the Google universe

Earlier this month Google announced the launch of Lively, a 3D virtual world inhabited by avatars – online alter egos that at times bear very little resemblance to their creators (Hey, if I had the power to virtually reconstruct my face, dress up my ‘av in some blinged out gear, I wouldn’t mind getting a little creative – know what I mean?)

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First signs of Lively surfaced last September when ‘a major internet company’ sent out invitations to Arizona State University students to test out a new social networking project they were working on.

Lively uses a chat engine powered by Google’s GTalk and users can roam the pre-constructed virtual spaces created by other Lively users or simply choose to create a new one from ground up. According to Niniane Wang, Engineering Manager at Google – rooms can feature YouTube videos in virtual TVs and show photos in virtual picture frames uploaded from Picasa. Fancy having Achmed The Dead Terrorist play on your make believe telly? Now you can!

A variety of rooms await your avatar – there’s the ‘Fight Club’ where you and some pals can kick the cr&p out of each other, or if you prefer, the ‘Sex Club’ where ‘NO SEX (is) ALLOWED’. Go figure!

It’s hard not to draw comparisons between Lively and Second Life, the somewhat controversial creation from Linden Lab. Lively’s key difference is that unlike SL, users cannot buy and sell products (thus negating the use of in-world currency. SL Residents transact in Linden Dollars to buy and sell services and virtual goods to one another)

What’s also cool about Lively is users’ ability to embed code snippets into their blogs, ala YouTube. We think it should make its way into social networks pretty soon, allowing Google to infiltrate app-enabled social networks like Facebook and Friendster without having to buy them over!

Just when major brands like American Apparel were starting to pull out from Second Life, Lively comes along and blows the fast closing doors wide open. It was only last April that Gartner predicted that ‘by the end of 2011, 80% of active Internet users will have some sort of presence in a virtual world’. It remains to be seen how Lively and SL play out the teeter-totter (and oftentimes volatile) game of virtual worlds.

It’ll also be interesting to see if Google monetizes the site, and more importantly how they plan to do it. What we all know is that they have a humongous base of users. And like a giant nest of hungry chicks all ready and willing to chew on any worm Google dangles in front of them, it’s inevitable that Lively will become a hit no time. Combine that with Google’s uncanny ability to integrate their apps seamlessly (think Gmail + AdWords + GTalk), we can be sure that millions of Google users will take to the Lively metaverse faster than you can say ‘Virtual reality!’

Lively is currently supported on Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox as a browser plugin, with Mac OS X and Linux versions on the way. For more information, visit Lively.com