Google lively will be last seen online on 31st December 2008.

by Glenn Paul - 11/23/2008 7905 Views

Google Shuts down ‘Lively’

Lively, the 3D chat plugin from Google is (was) a resulting product of “20% time”. Google employees are allowed to spend 20% of their total work time in their own ideas and come up new innovative products. The innovative interactivity of a 3D virtual realm was enabled through Lively. However, for some reason, Lively was not living upto its name from the beginning. Most of the lively chat rooms attracted only single digit visitors. Google’s attempt to target the unproven interactive web technology was excellent. However, the lack of good user interface and hectic load times (in India) made Google lively a less perfect product. Hence ‘Lively’ becomes another Google product to get scrapped directly from Google labs.

The Social networking boom might have driven Google to offer the users with something different (that most of the other social networking giants couldn’t provide). However, Google should have atleast considered the technology limitations in Countries other than the United States. In today’s busy world, people don’t even stick around business pages if they take a long time load. Google Lively which is an entertainment stuff (as it looks) takes even more time to load stands no chance.

In the last four and a half months since Google lively’s launch, atleast a very few people around the globe would have enjoyed the 3D chat plugin-‘Lively’. And now it’s time to bid adieu to this futuristic chat plugin (for now). Google has planned to shutdown lively by the end of December 2008. As stated in Google Lively, “We will shut down Lively on December 31, 2008. Embedded rooms in blogs and other web pages will continue to show an image, but users will no longer be able to enter Lively rooms and interact”.

For the moment of truth, we too have spent some leisure time having a coffee at Jen's coffee house (a well known chat room of Lively). Let’s hope that Lively will appear soon in the web carrying some other name!

Category :

Google

Tags :

Google, Social Media, Technology

About Glenn Paul

The Author is a Search Engine Optimization researcher with more than 5 years of expertise in the .... more info about the author