Google lively is a very clever social interaction “environment” that is simple to set up and modify, and may appeal a lot to folks who like some visual feedback when chatting with others. I don’t think this will replace the experience for hard core second life folks, but I’m fairly sure it’ll cut the number of *new registrations* at Second Life by quite a bit. In fact I’m sure they are now discussing how to handle this major assault on what was a virtual monopoly (literally and figuratively) at Second Live.
I’m unable to embed my Google Lively rooms here, though I just tested and they work fine in blogger blogs.
It’s funny how things come back around. About ten years ago I got my tourism board of directors to experiment with “virtual meetings” using avatars and within a simple browser framework. I even forget the program. The technology was fine – even it allowed chats and a way to “carry” groups of people to different URLs so you could demo new web pages and such. However the mostly non-tech crowd simply was not comfortable interacting in this fashion and I got very limited participation. Even now this is the case for many, but I think the growing number of technophiles combined with the current generation of young folks who are very comfortable with virtual worlds will open up this type of “conversation” to include a large segment of the population – enough to make this a significant new addition to the online communication landscape.
Niniane Wang from Google has the intro blog post:
Official Google Blog: Be who you want on the web pages you visit
The New York Times Brad calls this a “Whackier” kind of Google, which I think is a compliment.
Joe Duck 
Entropia Universe is the most interesting virtual world game. They were the first with a full blown virtual economy and you can even get an ATM card to cash out!
Amazing what is happening in the virtual world. Maybe our ancestors perfected the virtual environment and we are just catching up to them – wink wink, nudge, nudge…
Maybe our ancestors perfected the virtual environment and we are just catching up to them
Good one! How *could you test* the idea that we are already in some form of virtual world / simulation?
I’m not quite sure just what Second Life is. I recall reading of some sort of ‘rapes by avatars’ there (or was it elsewhere?) and I recall one woman in NYC committed an act of prostitution in return for some quantity of ‘virtual gold’ that was good only on War of Worlds or something like that.
Visual feedback when chatting with others?
I think the advantage is that there is NO visual feedback. How many telecommuters want visual feedback when they’ve not yet had thier morning coffee? Second Life? Maybe I’ll look into it, but right now I’m trying to deal with First Life… and I need that cup of coffee before any feedback there too!
Well, I read that google announcement (or atleast the first few parts of it) and no thanks. Not interested in interacting avatars or virtual hugs.
Not interested in animations or videos.
Text.
FoolsGold – c’mon dude, you need to get out more!
I mean with an avatar that bears no relationship to you in the virtual world that bears no relationship to the real world…
Ummmm… never mind….
There is no spoon…