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."
I didn't even know about this (Score:4, Insightful)
What's that? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the fact that nobody's ever *heard* of this obscure Google service is part of the reason it hasn't been successful.
Wasnt a bad concept (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably something similar will appear shortly, or exist already, at least if the biggest problem of lively wasn't of the concept but that it dont fit in google's main focus.
Tag (Score:3, Insightful)
"Deadely" shoud be a tag for "cancelled for spending too much with no visible benefits".
Re:What's that? (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't realize google announces their new products on ./, I thought they had a homepage of their own, which draws significantly more traffic. If google would draw some attention to the stuff they launch on their own homepage then it might actually work.
It would also help if the service wouldn't suck, but that's another matter, that would serve to keep the people once they've found it.
Re:What's that? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that we hadn't heard about it, it's that we heard about it and dismissed it immediately as a bad clone of a bad idea, and ignored it after that.
It's possible that with everyone scared about the economy these days, Google will finally do what every other company does and seek to monetize all of its offerings. If it has something that costs a lot of money without bringing any revenue in, that thing will be gone. Even Google will run out of cash eventually if it spends all its money supporting every dumb idea its employees come up with.
Re:Line of thought (Score:1, Insightful)
There's a house upstairs?
Re:Good Riddance (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't they try this back in 1997 with VRML? It was useless then, it hasn't changed now.
Nothing of value was lost (Score:3, Insightful)
Yup. How they expected to compete with Second Life with a Windows-only client I don't know. Good riddance.
Re:It's not an easy thing to do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's that? (Score:3, Insightful)
If Google did that, their homepage would look like a MySpace page and nobody would want to use it anymore.
Re:And does anyone care? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well said! And conversely, the video phone has yet to kill the audio-only phone, although the tech has been around (and affordable) for 40-odd years [wikipedia.org]. Picturephone used only three twsted pair wires, which was well within the capabilities of 1960s telephony tech. And sure, Picturephone was expensive, but today the tech is much cheaper, and yet there is little uptake.
About the only place you'll see video phones today are small niche markets (like field reporters, or soldiers on tours of duty phoning home). For most people, video phones are a solution searching for a problem.
Re:Nothing of value was lost (Score:3, Insightful)
They probably intended to compete over the 98% windows users before caring about the other 2%...
Re:It's not an easy thing to do... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure I can agree with that. Remember that WoW was very late to a market that had already been developed my many MMORPGs--EverQuest, notably, and AC and others. I think that sometimes being first to market isn't an advantage at all, and Google of all companies is in a position to appreciate this, as Google succeeded largely by being very late to the search engine market.
WoW and Google succeeded so dominantly because they were better, and a big part of why they were better than the established players was because they learned from the existing market, and because they had no established customers they were worried about losing.
as opposed to... (Score:3, Insightful)
This makes Lively one of Google's few scrapped products...
Re:Nothing of value was lost (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tag (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft Bob (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, that would be really cool. I know it is often remarked that Second Life is pointless and such but there are actually very well put together "recreations" of real world locations. It is kind of cool to be able to "teleport" between Tokyo, Paris, Dublin and Berlin. I know they are not 100% bu tat least you get a feeling of what the place is like. In fact, it could be a great way to increase tourism to your destination by recreating a "demo" of what a person may experience there but just enough so they have to see it for themselves. Google Street View could even take this a step further. Sure its great to see a picture of a place and sure it may even be great to walk around in that picture (Street View) but if you were able to get just enough of that "I gotta see it firsthand" factor you could rake in the tourist dollars.
Disclaimer: You may want to leave airport arrival and customs clearance out of the demo experience.