Google Lively

» see lively.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

lively did not survive long enough to find me. it launched on 8 july 2008 in open beta and was shut down on the last day of that year, a little under six months later. the entire product fits inside one summer of news cycles.

the pitch was modest in a way google projects rarely are. you would go to lively.com and install a small windows plugin (no mac client at launch, no linux client ever). then you picked a cartoon avatar from a fixed catalog and stepped into a small room rendered in flash. the rooms could be embedded as iframes in any web page. that part was the only real innovation in it, you could drop a 3d hangout next to a youtube video on a blog and the readers could meet inside the comments.

i was in turkey on ttnet adsl that summer, on a windows xp box that could in theory have run it. i remember the launch landing in the tech blog rotation. i did not click through. the screenshots looked like the lobby of a 2003 mmo someone had rebuilt as a chat app, which was a bad position to be in against second life on one side and msn on the other.

niniane wang ran the project from inside google's 20 percent program, the spare-time policy that gave engineers a fifth of their week for side ideas. she had been at microsoft on the flight simulator team before joining google. arizona state university ran a closed test of lively in classes during development. that academic angle was the part most of the press caught onto first.

on 19 november '08 google announced the shutdown over the company blog. the official line was that lively needed too much resourcing to scale and the priority was core search and apps. the servers stayed live through new year's eve so that users could take screenshots of their rooms before the lights went out. there was no export, the rooms themselves went into the bin with the rest of it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

lively was flash for the avatar and a small native helper for the rendering layer. the rooms supported up to 20 concurrent visitors. each user picked from a fixed catalog of avatars and a fixed catalog of room props. you could not buy a custom hat or sell anything. the whole economy of second life was deliberately absent.

that was the design call that made lively feel weightless compared to its peers. second life in 2008 had a working virtual currency and a developer community making real money on it. there.com had the same in a more casual frame. anyway, lively wanted the social feel of those products without the commerce, and what was left after pulling commerce out was a chat room with a 3d backdrop.

~ the end ~

the user numbers never published, but tech press in november '08 estimated lively had under 10 thousand active visitors when google pulled it. the press release said the team would be redeployed to other projects, which in practice meant niniane wang and the small group moved on inside google. she left google in 2010.

the timing also mattered. by late '08 google was already deep into the financial-crisis cost cuts that closed several smaller projects around the same time. lively was an easy line to draw a pen through, since the engineering cost was real and the user count was a rounding error.

~ what carried over ~

the embeddable-virtual-world idea kept getting revisited. google itself returned to the territory with cardboard and daydream (both in inventory). none of them were direct descendants but the lively pitch (a 3d room you could drop into a webpage) became the implicit prompt for every browser-based metaverse demo through the 2020s. roblox eventually did the kid-shaped version of it at scale. the adult version is still mostly waiting for someone to ship it.

niniane wang has since written publicly about the lively shutdown as one of the cleaner kills in google's product graveyard. the team got 90 days' notice. the users got six weeks. the project simply stopped, with no rebrand or absorption into another team, which was rare for google in those years.

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