Even Google is getting into the downsizing spirit. It just announced that it is killing Lively, its browser-based virtual worlds that could be embedded into other Websites. Lively launched just last July. The death notice on the site says it will shut down on December 31, so we are adding Lively to the deadpool.
Lively just never took off, and was extremely far afield for Google. A post on the Google Blog explains the decision:
. . . we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.
We should have known something was up when we noticed that it didn’t work with Google’s own browser, Chrome. It’s Google Website Trends chart says it all. After an initial spike, it flat-lined. Hype can only go so far.
Maybe Google didn’t kill Lively so much as mercifully pull the plug. This is a good sign actually that Google is willing to weed out non-performing products. What else is being cut at Google?
What else should be?
I thought you wrote Writely.
Never heard of Lively.
Never heard of lively too… he he;) The real reason to reply to the first comment is to appear on top, so that I could get feed back about this: Google enabled themes in GMail now and it is cool, did you guys get it? And there is a Planets theme and it don’t seem to work… Please Comment and sorry for steaking the top spot…
http://mail.goo...p;answer=112508
Good move by Google, only MS silverlight can confront prevailing “flash platform.” Too many plugins are not good.
i suppose today they also just made every search result commentable… and digg-like where you can move them up, or delete them altogether — didn’t see that coming, and haven’t seen it before so I suppose it’s new… it is interesting…
Lively was led by Niniane Wang, an engineering manager at Google. She used to work at Microsoft games before.
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College: http://www.inkampus.com
ouch
That’s a great idea to see the GOOG cut the fat. Now can we get someone to start implementing cool add-ons for its Chrome browser.
Why? There is a browser with a lot of add-ons already.
not good. I was thinking they will one day hook it up with their Sketchup product and make it browser based instead of a downloadable.
Good. Lively was dumb.
Not only did they kill Lively… did you see that they added a 300 x 250 advertisement to Google Finance?
@Derek – Those are annoying. They completely broke the flow of the website just to add some useless badly-pointed ads! Terrible!
As for an on-topic comment, I never heard of Lively…
It isn’t far afield if they sell in-game advertising.
In-game advertsing was really hard to sell back in 1998/1999 when I was doing it, I wonder if it has got any easier.
Lively “Requires Windows Vista/XP with Internet Explorer or Firefox”. Wonder if this type of requirement isn’t a turn off to users these days.
Yes, that limited it to only about 95% of the world market (and to 98.4% of users with working brains).
what happens to the 20% time and the free food
Does it get cut to 5%
It’s about time. Lively, in my opinion, was a completely silly move.
I don’t know what else absolutely NEEDS to go, but they sure need to work on making Google Docs better. I finally gave into trying out Zoho, and it’s a lot better..
lasted all of one launch on my desktop – AV’s doing the robot! on X/Y axis’s – underwhelemed to say the least. Wonder if they will have a similar moment when it comes to the half-baked knol!
Lively was a great idea by Google but poorly designed, without much respect of lessons learned in virtual worlds or focus on specific valuable applications, as I’ve commented here upon its launch: http://blogs.el...com/sibley/?p=5 It is tragic, because I do think Google could (and someday may) bring a ton of value to the virtual worlds industry. They need to look outside their own walls to learn from what is already on the marketplace, imho.
I guess it’s not about downsizing – it’s a business decision that sooner or later had to be made.
Hope that the googlers who worked on this kept their jobs…
What ever happens to the IP of projects like these. Does it just get buried never to be used again? Theres obviously some solid work that has gone into this app.
How long until Knol takes the same route?
http://www.goog...=all&sort=0
they should really think about cutting search. with all the revenue from chrome, maps, gmail, goog411, youtube, news, finance, groups, oh and froogle, who needs search anymore?
Kill Knol next! It’s absolute crap too.
I love Android and most Google stuff, but lively sucked.
Google should get into @home if they can.
Avatar products are ridiculous. Lively just didn’t work when I tried it.
Google should kill anything that doesn’t directly make money for them, but that would require firing probably 8000 of their 9000 engineers.
Interesting given how much excitement and funding virtual worlds have been getting lately despite the financial situation…
http://gigaom.c...8-mm-in-q3-498/
This video is sweet, where can I get it
Hmm… you’re joking, right?
Goggle surely will delete something that they had created but less value.
now that is recession! {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/2FNQqxZDqy_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”now that is recession! ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/cnxp3wziXr”}}}
No need to make a video for such a simplistic comment.
Now if Linden Labs would kill off Second Life
Why?
Second Life is a thriving community full of creative, interesting people. It’s profitable for LL. It’s the only virtual world where people have to the freedom to create whatever they can imagine. It has a real, working economy with over 1,000,000 USD changing hands every day and over 60,000 people making a profit every month selling their virtual goods and services. Real Life businesses are using it for training and virtual meetings. RL colleges are using it for classes and recruitment.
These seem like some pretty compelling reasons for Linden Lab to stay in business.
I played with Lively on my wife’s PC and really liked the idea of being able to embed a virtual world in a web page. The graphics were really nice (compared to Second Life). I would have even tried to use it for some of my elearning projects if it had been cross-platform. It’s sad to see a project with so much potential die on the vine. My condolences to the Lively developers.
Toyed with Vivaty and Lively for sometime. Did not find it that useful in any way, nor as a pastime, neither something to be looked into.
Not all of Google’s apps take to the road , see Google Health for example … I found it lately , never knew about it earlier . Didnt know that Microsoft had Healthvault for that matter too … both the Microsoft Healthvault and Google health lets you create portfolios .. if thats whats is supposed to be , what is the big deal.
I guess some apps never take the centrestage.
Lively was terrible – didnt even support Sketchup ! … total junk – these browser based virtual worlds just dont cut the mustard.
What will they kill next? I’ve heard search isn’t working out too well for them, that’s probably next on the list…
I’ve heard a rumor they are selling their search business to MSFT
. They are focusing on you-tube and gmail.
As far as I and 99.5% of other Google users are concerned, they provide a search service and a free email service. None of us have any idea or the slightest interest in what their other junk is all about. God help you lot who apparently have nothing better to do but talk about this rubbish which nobody cares about or is ever likely to use.
Lively was a great idea but too early and too crude. A research project, if you will… So it died. No surprise here… Maybe in a few years…
They should kill Chrome next.
Google should just “donate” money to wikipedia or other properties that can expand their search ad business. Buying them outright seems hostile, but donating money is so good for PR.
I think I should shutdown http://www.lively.fm too
Google is proving that they will bite the bullet when required and not to dodge them all the time lik AOL.
I’m glad Google is willing to kill off their failed projects. Perhaps Knol is gets the boot next?
I wonder if Google Analytics generates enough revenue to compensate for the undoubtebly high costs of tracking that massive amount of pageviews.
I’m guessing that they consider it part of the overall offering to for advertisers, and that it helps to drive that core business.
If Google just wants to concentrate on Search, Ads & Apps, then they should make sure that all of their vast range of Products and Services fits into either of their Three main core assets.
Lively fitted nowhere, the same can be said for Knol and Google Base.
Search & Ads seem to be fully covered by Google, especially if you integrate Google Earth, Google Maps, YouTube & Android into the mix.
But it is the failure of Google’s Apps Division which is where Google should be placing most of their resources into if they want it to be a major success.
Google Docs should be treated like Google in the same way as Windows or Office is by Microsoft.
Google should cut out most of the fat that they are carrying in little half baked beta ideas – and get most of their talented workers fully concentrated on making Google Apps work.
Deadly sin, GOOG has done? No!
Lively was bad.
-Nikhil
I too hope that the product team that worked on this find other jobs within Google, but agree that it’s good that they got rid of what seemed like a fun, experimental but ultimately pointless product.
It’s also probably time for Google to be brave and kill off another few projects… As others have said Knol springs to mind for a start…
And furthermore, to re-allocate resources and actually finish off a lot of products that STILL feel under-featured – I’m talking about you Google Docs.
And let’s see more features and integration with the rest of Google’s products – I don’t know how Google organizes their product groups, but from their product role out I would hazard a guess that they have a load of fairly automonous groups that dont’ really communicate with eachother.
For a company whose self-proclaimed mission is to organize the World’s information, they do a terrible job at integrating their products with eachother.
to be fair, iGoogle is starting to become a product dashboard, but it should be much stronger than it is at the moment. Although Apple’s Mobile Me is very flawed performance wise (and underfeatured…) they do a much better job at making an internet suite of products that are integrated with eachother.
And also are they going to focus on the cloud or desktop apps? For example the Google Talk executable – is this going to be further developed, or will we see it as a cloud app in a Chrome framework with notification managed via a small executable app or Google Desktop? There’s far too many products like this where you just don’t know where Google are going with it, or whether they think it’s finished, or whether they’ve just lost interest.
Anyway, here’s to Google smartening up and focussing much more on products beyond their core search and advertising business – it’s a shame that it’s taken a recession and crash for them to start with this, though.
totally predictable – didnt support THEIR OWN technology – no sketchup importer, no chrome … terribly implimented … they simply had no clue in this new emerging virtual world space.
Techcrunch.com should be removed from the Google search index. immediately
Wth is your problem you ?
Lively was not going to survive no matter how you slice it. Shutting this down is not a recession-related move, it is a product and business decision. Lively got no traction despite significant investment and the corporate power of the big G. It was clunky as hell, required a plug-in (kiss of death in browserland) even to view embeds, and didn’t allow users to do most of the things they actually wanted to do. That might have been forgivable if everything around them wasn’t so much better. It had no shot against the likes of Second Life, IMVU, Whirled, and Habbo Hotel – Lively was simply not competitive.
Google has ventured into so many unrelated areas and this outcome is expected.
Strange they are giving up so fast. Perhaps they don’t understand virtual worlds to well. Open source worlds like http://www.virtualworld.sl will be the future. They are driven by people who have a passion for virtual worlds and understand them, those people made their own virtual world server applications and those worlds are coming online now.
Still one should have expected that Google would have done more effort in this segment of the market.
As virtual worlds go (of which I suspect that most TechCrunch readers aren’t connoisseurs) Lively wasn’t all that bad. Yes, I needed to install something, but it was quick and easy. But know what? It worked when I ran it.
Seems like meez has a decent combo of in-world and on-page experiences…
http://www.goog...=all&sort=0
That’s unfortunate. I’d love to hire some of the engineers who worked on Lively. Drop me a line if you are interested in python / AS 3 work in the virtual reality gaming space in SF. cheers, gracelaw AT mac DOT com
I’m glad they shut it down. I signed up in July and dropped it immediately, it was so annoying.
google failed
Thats sad. It didn’t look that bad, when I recently checked it out.
An Second Life keeps dying too at a rate of about 80 regions per day as you can see on http://www.tale...index.php?id=62.
The Livelyzens (Lively users) are coming together to appeal to Google to keep Lively alive.
Lively is a great platform for interaction as well as creativity. It is easy to use, browser based, embeddable on webpages to bring a 3D experience right on your website. While Lively has been in beta and has limited capability in terms of the objects and avatars available, the Livelyzens have been able to come up with very creative ways to create art from what is available. All this in a “clean” 3D world thanks to Google’s vigilance in getting rid of rooms with inappropriate content. More than anything, Lively has become a place to make friends for life – from all over the world with wonderful people.
Please visit our website http://livelyzens.com and participate in the Lively Machinima contest we are conducting to show the creative potential of Google Lively. Please also sign our online petition http://livelyze...m/petition.aspx
We kindly request netizens to support us in reviving a wonderful 3D world that is a kid friendly and a creative space for art and interaction amongst adults.
Really? I think actually Google surprises us with a new lively, yes,
http://www.newlively.com
Let’s see how it goes. At least not really a bad news for people who love lively.