Eloise Pasteur's Library tagged lively →  View Popular

If you want to interact with an object (sitting down, for example), single left click on the object. If you want to play an animation, single left click on your avatar, and select an item from the animations tab (different lists of animations are available depending on whether you are sitting or standing).

And ... that's actually about it. Lively is simple, and straightforward, and focuses on doing one thing well: The furnishable 3D chatroom. It can be embedded on a webpage and your avatar can be in multiple rooms at once via different browser windows or tabs.

If you've got a group of up to 20 people (who all have Google accounts and are running Windows), and want to share a Youtube video or sit around and shoot the breeze in a lightweight space, and having your own content isn't for you, then Lively is for you.

“Linden Lab” room a close second. Figuring out that here I would already find a few familiar faces from Second Life®, I went for that one.

The choice was certainly correct — Dusan Writer, Grace McDunnough, Jurin Juran, and likely a few others (sometimes it’s not easy to figure out who’s who!) were around in the room, testing the cumbersome interface. And cumbersome it is!

After all, Mike Elgan from ComputerWorld claims:

What that means is that companies will be able to re-create their office and meeting space, and events companies can create or re-create entire conferencing facilities. Your avatar can wander around, see the “booths,” check out the conferences or interface with other “attendees” — all in virtual space. 

Really, Mike?… They might do that, but definitely not on Lively.

So why are people so enthusiastic about Google Lively?

I have only one explanation: it has the brand “Google” behind it.

Google is known to be “the company that does no evil”. But looking from my point of view — an enthusiast of the 3D Social Web — I feel cheated. We were doing great in opening the minds to millions of users to look at the Metaverse as Second Life defines it as the next human-machine interface for all our tasks. Granted, we all know it’ll take ages — another decade at least — but we all are here for the long term.

Instead, what we get from one of the industry giants is that “3D is bad, embedding cartoons on Web pages is good”. Why? Well, it should be obvious. Google is the market leader in (2D) web search content — both text and images (and soon video). While there is an HTML-based World-Wide Web, Google will be a major player in it — always.

Google’s Lively is basically a chat client. But then to some, so is Second Life. And it has some advantages:

- The Google name and reach

- Clean, sculpty looking objects

- A small download

- A peppy, bright, bubbly sort of chat space

- Link to your Google profile and log-in information (G-mail etc.)

- The ability to embed youTube videos and watch them with your friends

- A maniacal giggle (with its downside that it’s text activated, just say the word laugh and you’re laughing as in “That’s nothing to laugh about”)

And it has distinct disadvantages as well, in particular no support for the Mac (were they in SUCH a huge rush? Did the Vivaty launch onto Facebook accelerate their plans ahead of support for the Mac platform?), bugs, crashes, avatar limits, and a bit of a learning curve.

And on advertising:

17.1 Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the Services, queries made through the Services or other information.