Lively: I told you so

Google Says: Lively is Dead

And, I told you so.

Making an IMVU clone when you're gigantic monolithic company Google? Try harder.

So, I wonder, thinking back about the hype announcements that RRR and MoU made. Looks like they were, as suspected, just hype. While Millions of Us almost always follows through with its hype with events and builds that get good user turnout, for Rivers Run Red, this is just another in a string of hype-fizzles. You know, like, "Duran Duran in Second Life" or their current "Partnership with Linden Lab to provide business applications in Second Life"? Or how about the virtuallife.tv?

Why the animosity? It could be because all of the big companies doing third party development in virtual worlds are taking hits, and it's these false hype things that continue to tarnish the reputation of the viability of virtual worlds. I wish that both developers and businesses would bother to fully research the viability of platforms and projects before they go gung-ho into them. Usually, it's end-companies guilty of this hype. I just wonder why companies do apparently so little research into the end-result of virtual world projects. Do companies just not care whether their project succeeds or not?

As my CEO, Drew Stein, has said before, we developers should look as ourselves as sherpas. This new technology is something we should be very familiar with, and it's our job to educate the corporate-types. The problem is that we as an industry tend to only educate our clients, and very little public education is being done. And cooperative? Almost none at all - excepting the various conferences like SLCC and Virtual Worlds.

So, if any virtual world developer is shocked that Lively is gone, I tell you: You don't know your industry well enough at all!

Side-note: If anyone at Google wants to take a real shot at a good interactive world, give me a call. Let me rephrase that: If anyone at Google Earth wants to take a real shot at a good interactive world, let's talk about how *so close* you are already. ;)

Disclaimer: MoU and RRR are two of my company Involve's competitors, and I have previously *briefly* contracted for RRR.