Google To Shut Down Lively
A sad day at Google, specially for the team who worked really hard behind this project. But unfortunately that didn’t seem to happen as Google is shutting down this project by the end of the year. Lively, a browser-based virtual world environment which apparently was Google’s answer to Second Life was launched back in July, just about 4 months before where users were able to create their own virtual world.
Google announced the news today with a blog post on its official Google blog.
…we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.
It’s unknown exactly what has triggered Google to shut down Lively just within few months of it being launched. But I guess there could be many reasons including this global financial downfall or may be Google’s anticipation didn’t quite match with the actual outcome or users response. Though Google has said it’s prioritizing its resources and focusing more on core search, ads and apps business. But whatever it is, it’s really hard for any businesses to take this kind of decision. I think Google is wise enough to know exactly when to pull the plug off rather than pushing it too far.
Google has asked all its users to save their work outside Lively before it shuts down.
We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.
So if you’ve created something at Lively.com then please copy it across to somewhere else.
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