Socially|Mundane

Over at Tidalblog is posed the question: "Did Second Life and OpenSim just eat Google's lunch?"

The short answer: "Umm, no."

At least, not on the face of it. Google's "Lively" was an experiment. It was created as an extracurricular activity by one of Google's developers and was really pretty simple in structure and overall... whatever.

It was cutting edge, awesome wow-factor technology ten years ago. On top of that, the way it works has to do with utilizing Google resources - server space, bandwidth, all that stuff.

From a user's perspective, a plug-in was required to use it in a web browser. It did not work with Macintosh or Linux or anything else besides Microsoft Windows, which (very slowly) is actually beginning to lose ground, much like the great Roman empire (and will take just as long to fall, if you ask me: somewhere around 800 years.)

The problem with lively is that it is room-based. You cannot jump from room to room unless those rooms were "hosted" by the same web site. However, the vast majority of web sites are empty of users most of the time. So entering a web site's room was usually a 10-second tour of a ghost town.

There was no central gathering place for its users and there was no way to 'jump' from one main location to another the way you can in second Life and most other virtual worlds.

So, in short, why put in all these resources if no one is going to use it? Google needs to continue focusing on its core business: internet search and cataloguing, etc.

TidalBlog:: "There is a widely held belief that Google and Microsoft could easily turn their geospatial products into mass market virtual worlds containing avatars. While virtual world products such as Twinity have indeed focused on replicating real-life locations, neither of the major players has, as far as I know, stated this as a near-term goal.

Moreover, I am reminded of Cory Ondrejka's observation that the now-defunct Google Lively was room-based to facilitate balancing resource requirements, something that may well prove challenging on the scale of Google Earth. This seems to be borne out in a recent interview with Popcha!, one of the Lively third-party developers, who suggest it was a combination of economic climate, technical scaling issues and uncertain business model that ultimately did for Lively."

Go over and read the article. it's a good read and an interesting subject.

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