Pretty mundane, eh?
I think everyone is having the same reaction to this news: even though no one is completely shocked, still, wow, they’re pulling the plug already? In case you haven’t heard, Google will be shutting down their first foray into avatar based virtual worlds, Lively, mere months after opening it.
Building retention appeal into virtual worlds is quickly becoming the greatest challenge they have to offer. Second Life benefited from being so forward thinking that it had a hard core community of content creators and early adopters when they hit the mainstream, which served as first generation evangelists for the platform. Google Lively never really had that; they were beta testing at a university, and then released to the world. I guess our friends at the Second Life Herald never really saw the potential either, despite being the only organization I knew with a Lively office.
For all of its imperfections, Second Life is clearly the closest thing we have to an open, communal, shared 3-D world, with OpenSim coming along nicely. For there to truly be a Second Life competitor, I’ve come up with a tongue-in-cheek, two question litmus test:
(1) Can you get naked?
(2) Can your avatar be anything other than human?
While this may seem simplistic, think about what other options are out there; none can answer yes to both questions. These two questions say a lot about the creators of a platform, and how much freedom they allow the users to have. Say what you will about Linden Lab, they have made some great decisions over the years, none greater than allowing users to express themselves in an infinite number of ways, and granting creators the intellectual property rights to their creations.
Lively had none of this: it was just a 2.5D chat room that looked like Adult Swim animation after a six-pack.