Google’s foray into 3 D chat - Google Lively - is going to be shut down at the end of this year http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/lively-no-more.html
Is Google the McDonald’s of the internet in that if they pull out of a neighbourhood it is time to sell up? I don’t think so.
Does she know? Hard to tell, she was ALWAYS pouting.
For me, Lively has never had the ingredients that would have made me feel a connection. It was contrived, I didn’t have enough control over my avatar or environment and — this is the most important — my friends and colleagues weren’t using it.
I gave it a go — even embedding it into its own page on my blog to see what comments, feedback, invitations I got.
So I’ll be farewelling the pouty teenaged me in Lively and exploring other browser-based 3D chat tools in the near future.
