Google’s Lively! Challenger To Second Life? Not Just Yet!

Google has gone live and social with Lively, it’s take on social networking/virtual online world, something similar to Second Life and I decided to take it out on a spin and to review it. At the outset, I am not a person who is into online/virtual identities and have never even visited Second Life ever. My thoughts about people who spend hours in the virtual world and take it so seriously are to “get a life”, however, in the case of Lively I only decided to check it out since I am a Google fan and I wanted to see for myself what Google had come up with. So how does Google Lively fare? Well since I have never been on Second Life or any other virtual world I cannot compare Google Lively with them, but I will be sharing what Google Lively is all about and how it looks, feels, and performs.

The layout is very bare bones and simple just like the Google homepage. While this is perfect for a search engine’s homepage, I am not sure it’s so good for a social networking site. Thankfully however the site is low on images and hence it loads quickly. You are required to log in with your Google ID and then download Lively software onto your system. Once the Lively software is downloaded and installed you have to click on it to launch it and then it launches a shortcut to the Lively homepage on the default browser of choice Firefox. As usual my favorite Opera is not supported. I wonder what’s the purpose of downloading Lively software if all it will do is direct me to the Lively homepage since I can bookmark and visit the site directly instead of needing to install software on my system. The first time I logged in the client on my desktop did pop up asking for my Google ID and password and then it disappeared once I obliged. From then on its all work and play in the browser and you get to choose an avatar, change/customize the avatar, enter a room and interact with the occupants there, but all to a degree only with the options given in Lively. There is no freehand customization where you can let your imagination run and customize anyways you want. Customization is only limited to the graphics, images and avatars provided in Lively, so I have let it be and gone with the default avatar. You also get to create your own room and even html code is provided to insert/port the room to your own blog, but I have yet to play around with these two features. For starters I only entered an already created room and my first choice was the room “Lost” where I met a few people and said my first Lively words.

Come to think of it this is my very first outing in an online world. It does take a long time to join a room with the room being prepared, in fact I got to brush and come back and even then the room was not ready for my occupancy. It did finally load, guess this is something that will improve with time as more users join in with Google sprucing up the servers. There are icons in a virtual tab letting you interact, talk, etc. when inside the room and all interaction is through the mouse by selecting these icons. You have to use the keyboard only to type out what you want to speak. Movement takes place by click and drag method where you literally have to drag your avatar around. While this sounds like a good idea where you control your avatar literally with the mouse, it translates badly and the response time and effort to get to move your avatar can get to you after a while. After finally entering the “Lost” room and saying my first Lively words and moving about (all of which took a good 30 min), I realized that there was nothing much else to do in the room. I have never been in Second Life, but I am sure Lively has a long way to go before it can even be favorably compared to Second Life especially from what I have seen of Lively and heard of Second Life. My thoughts were is this all there is to virtual worlds and virtual lives? I have been reading around the blogosphere and the major call seems to be to integrate Google Earth with Google Lively. Now if and when that happens, it would be something. You could live in your own/virtual home and in your backyard and yet in the virtual world.

What’s really disappointing and not at all expected from Google is the availability of porn on Lively. There are quite a few adult themed rooms available on Lively and really no way to monitor their usage. Youngsters could gain easy access and entry into these rooms. As for me, instead of limiting access, I would prefer there not be such rooms at all, but then I am sure that would count as restriction of freedom and the mandarins of the internet would be up in arms against Google in no time. Still it’s quite disappointing this coming from Google who are so anti-porn in their ads and all other services and yet have allowed it so early on into Lively.

I am sure with time Lively will grow and morph into something much better, but how long and in what direction this will head depends entirely on Google and the online community that gets built around Lively. As of this moment though, Lively is disappointing to say the least and not at all like any of the awesome Google products I have come to love and use on a daily basis.