Will Google's Lively Become Second Life's Foyer?

New World Notes partner Koinup recently added Google's Lively to the list of worlds featured on their virtual world-based social network-- go here to check it out.  That's the Lively avatar of Koinup CEO Pierluigi Casolari on the left, who goes by "Koinup Burt" in Second Life... who also chose "Koinup Burt" as an avatar name in Lively.  When I tried out Lively for GigaOM, I attempted to choose "Hamlet Au", but somehow, that title was already taken, so you can find me as a hipster with a giant 'fro named "wjamesau".  (For some reason, however, when you search "Hamlet" as an avatar in Lively, you wind up with... a cute cartoon pig.)   

According to Second Life art maven Bettina Tizzy, some people are grabbing up Lively names that resemble established Second Life Residents.  "Whether you intend to spend time on Google's new virtual world Lively or not," she writes, "you'd best get over there and ensure that-- at the very least-- your virtual world name is protected. Grab an account at Lively in your Second Life® name and ensure that it is yours."  Her Lively name is "Bettina Tizzy", and for that matter, after Linden Lab staffer John Lester created a Lively room dubbed, appropriately enough, "Linden Lab", reports Dusan Writer, it was "Overtaken by SLers."  It currently resembles an underwater base, and since you can stream YouTube videos, you can watch a classic Second Life machinima from Robbie Dingo displayed from within Lively.  A search shows that Lively rooms with "Second Life" in their description come up 137 times.  ("World of Warcraft" in Lively, by contrast, yields just 16.) 

All this enthusiasm suggests an interesting phenomenon: at a certain level, Lively is becoming a web-based foyer for Second Life users, a midway immersion point between all the Web 2.0 sites and services already infected by SL culture, and SL itself.

Comments

[Gary Hayes]

Interestingly I find Lively a very good Machinima tool already. Combined with the environment customisation elements around the corner for GL (as it will be called) the fun animations built in now (with plans to allow import) and most importantly the ability to embed your rooms/environs inside your 'social content' I think it will be more than a foyer - perhaps a series of 'city parks' to second lifes 'difficult to get into theme world' - or is that the other way round? :)

More on the anims on my post - here

[Pavig Lok]

Long time ago - maybe 7 years - I argued for a combination of rooms based virtual worlds and actual space. 2.5d rooms worlds have existed since the 80s and variations on 3d space worlds have existed since the early ninties. Both have their benefits but both have drawbacks. I think there is a solution.

Imagine you could take an SL parcel and give it a status of "room". Within the room heavy stuff like physics would be turned off. To people in sl though the room would be a part of continuous space.

Imagine we also have a lightweight web client like lively - it can only visit "rooms" and so any parcel marked as such in sl. When they enter this room it works just like lively - they can only see things in the room. Anything (architecture, land, trees)outside the room is contained in a single texture rendered onto a skydome server side. They can enter into a limited lively like chat space within the sl like environment but not leave the room itself.

This would give areas that exist half way between the flat space of the web and the rich 3d world of sl and it's bretheren, where the computational cost of entry would be lightweight enough to run on an iphone or as a plugin.

Lively style rooms vs SL style immersive 3d has been an argument long enough now that I'm amazed that nobody has created a VW that bridges the gap.

Just my two cents.. and in answer to Hamlet; Yes, lively and it's bretheren are likely to become the foyer worlds.

[Rob]

Before I go further, I must say I like Lively and feel it will grow...however... in it's current state, it has nothing that really keeps you coming back. You have nothing to earn or build on. It's just a chat. And most of the time it is slow and your avatar is difficult to control compared to most other virtual worlds.

Back to what I said earlier, "it will grow," you can see that Google has already put some features that look like future plans for settlement. The catalog items have prices, all FREE right now, but someday when you can build your own (in sketchup maybe?), you can buy them with Google dollars perhaps.