Virtual Worlds Forum

Ondrejka first, who likes the fact that Lively runs in a browser, is structured into rooms rather than one monolithic world, and integrates directly with Google Talk for communications. He’s also keen on the design aesthetic. However, he’s not so impressed with reports claiming that Lively is a potential Second Life killer:

“First, Lively has a host of unknowns. Will Google quickly get it running on OS X, or will Google’s love-hate relationship with Apple slow things down? How flexible will the user-generated content become (and will you buy it with Google Checkout)? Sketchup and Google Earth integration? Also, what are you going to do in Lively? Club Penguin runs everywhere and isn’t just a chat environment. Instead, there are tons of games and activities on top of the social bits.”

He concludes that Lively won’t achieve “Google web search levels of dominance”, but is an important step forward for the industry because it will add interest and excitement to the space. The latter point is also made by Verbeck in his blog post, who thinks Lively will “cause all the more companies to look into virtual worlds seriously”.

However, he has several reservations about the platform, including the way it’s not targeted at tweens, yet also doesn’t support enterprises wishing to create rooms and host them inside their firewall - two potentially big markets. He also talks about the issues that brands may have with Lively:

“Large media companies who are publishers of virtual worlds, including efforts to expand beyond the tween demographic, have told me directly that they are not interested in having their work in a new medium hosted by Google; they fear that they’ll lose more advertising models to Google down the road… Advertisers thinking of using virtual worlds want one of two things: either a) execute a great marketing effort in a virtual world that already has a lot of eyeballs that they can easily get in front of, or b) an experience they can easily drive their own traffic to that adds to the effectiveness of their other marketing expenditures. On a) Lively doesn’t yet have users (obviously they just announced, so give it some time and we’ll see), and on b) Lively requires the installation of a plug-in, which even the most enticing ad just won’t get that many mainstream users to install in order to interact with a brand on-line.”

He concludes that Google Lively may end up being “another Google Video” (i.e. unsuccessful) in its current direction, although he accepts that if Google manages to drive mass adoption of its Lively browser plug-in, that may change. “My bet: other companies come up with the perfect virtual world applications, and Google eventually acquires some of them,” he says.