Not so Lively

Well, that was a short run. Today Google announced that they are pulling the plug on Lively.

Lively no more

The free private virtual world platform went into beta last July. It showed some promise, and after a discussion with one of the project team I had some hope that they were going to enhance it for education. The big add that needed to be made was voice support. Any virtual platform that even wants to think about being taken up by education needs to have full voice support at an absolute minimum, and should have some kind of video support for streaming and live broadcast. Google Lively had neither.

Very soon after the launch of the beta Lively rooms started popping up in violation of the terms of service and community standards with adult themes and content. When these rooms started landing at the top of the popular rooms list, users started getting offended and making complaints. This combined with the fairly limited avatar interactions most likely lead to the demise of this Google offering. This just goes to show that it takes more than a big company or slick graphics to make a virtual platform successful.