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Call me cynical but when Google releases a piece of software that only operates on a PC they don’t really have any serious expectations of large scale take-up - they hate to add value to Microsoft offerings. Google’s virtual world ‘Lively’ smacks of being one of those projects developed by their internal developers in their ‘own 20%’ part of the working day - put out to the public as more of a PR stunt than anything else. Being hailed in reviews as Google’s effort to enter the virtual territory of Linden Labs’ Second Life I thought it might impress me. But despite the fact that it is a lot easier to get started and customise your personal avatar, there’s really not much to do with it in a room the size of a virtual school hall.

At first I was quite impressed with Lively, it was relatively quick to install on my PC and I had no trouble in customising the appearance of my avatar (I actually gave up on Second Life last year). I managed to create my own room from the very limited selection of ’shells’ in their ‘catalogue and add ‘furniture’ etc. I started to think that this would make a nice virtual chat room for a business to liaise with its customers in a more human way. It soon dawned on me however that nearly all of my own clients are working in large businesses with computers administered by a central IT dept; they would not have the freedom to install the Google Lively .exe on their computers (or any .exe for that matter), and so therefore would be unable to communicate using such a method and rendering it unworthy of my business time.

So who will use Google Lively? Well if the current list of most popular rooms is anything to go by… dating sites and the sex industry (will chat rooms ever change?).  This evening’s popular rooms include ‘Porn Star Brasil’, ‘porn place’, ‘XXX Heaven’, ‘GLAMOUR PHOTO BY AL’… hardly giving Google Lively any serious position in the virtual world stakes. I am a bit puzzled by some of the backdrop shells matched against these sex rooms - they feature scantily clad women but Google state that ‘Most of the avatars, clothing, and objects were created by vendors working for Google. We’re also working with a small number of trusted testers, vendors and creative agencies as part of a test for creating custom items.’ So either they have some naughty developers or they are trusting some unusual agencies.

Technorati Tags: google lively, second life, linden labs, virtual reality

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