Google Terminates Lively 186
FornaxChemica writes "In a surprise move, Google announced today, both on-site and in its blog, that it will permanently shut down its 3D virtual world, Lively, by the end of the year. This makes Lively one of Google's few scrapped products, and one of the most short-lived, too, barely lasting 6 months. No official reason was given, only that Google wants to 'prioritize [its] resources and focus more on [its] core search, ads and apps business.' Lively might have taken too much and given back too little, even by Google's standards."
Mis-quoted (Score:5, Informative)
The odd gender usage is a mis-quote:
TFS:
prioritize his resources and focus more on his core search, ads and apps business
TFA:
prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business
Not surprising... (Score:5, Informative)
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/10/1428221 [slashdot.org]
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/09/1210218 [slashdot.org]
Re:Dear Google, (Score:5, Informative)
If you're just going to outright shit-can it, why not open-source it? At least then people can benefit from the energy you put into it instead of just throwing that all away.
Probably not an option for several reasons.
The first is that the Lively client is based on Gamebryo. This is closed-source, and extremely expensive at that (it's a top-tier game engine, these things can cost $100,000 or more, easily). So the client code is essentially useless for open source purposes (as part of a derivative work of Gamebryo, doing so might even be prohibited according to the Gamebryo license, but I don't know).
As for the server, Google generally isn't in the business of open sourcing server components of theirs (although exceptions have happened), so I doubt it will happen in this case.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Informative)
It's worth noting that Google didn't write SketchUp. Google bought SketchUp. The app's original authors deserve the credit for creating a first-rate schematic design tool.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Informative)
In 1997 I did a VRML copy of a shopping mall for a company based in Cincinnati; I went to the physical mall site, took a boatload of pictures, and set up the site as a test project on a 128k ISDN connection.
in order to keep server loads down, I split the mall up into 4 sections; each section was able to handle between 20-30 stock avatars (on 128k, remember) without crashing. very often.
each mall shop front was a door to the retailer; I put together a textures and objects package for them so they could continue the "theme", giving hopefully a seamless transition from the Mall environment to the store environment, including some CGI scripts to handle a VRML shopping cart. Each mall quarter had a information kiosk intended to house a staffer to answer questions, and the food court area was set up for social interaction between avatars (it was buggy, would have got better).
It worked perfectly. not quite up to 2nd life graphics, but closer than you might think; I had a plan to have the mall give CD handouts that would contain hi-res textures, the more complex objects, and the VRML client, since most people were on dial-up then.
They went ape shit. loved it. showed it to several major retailers, who also loved it.
Wanted me to come to Cincinnati to run it. I said no frakking way, or a variation thereof; I don't need to live there to run it, anyway. turned into a sticking point. they bought it from me, I bought a Jeep.
They hired a pretty high level geek to run it. He never could get it working right, probably because I'm a sort of intuitive designer (read: I don't comment), eventually they scrapped it. about 2 years later I started seeing some of the objects & textures for it in some commercial applications.
They never even made an effort to contact me for a fix; I talked to the high level geek sometime in 2003 (slashdotter, you know who you are). He said they were so pissed at me for refusing to move to Cincinnati that the veep in charge refused to even mention my name, had the guy go through it line by line to make sure I wasn't mentioned anywhere in the comments.
SO, it was a workable VRML e-commerce environment. shot down in its prime. Could have been a contender.