Caleb Booker

I had a lot of fun finding articles and blog entries desperate for excuses as to why Lively is no good. Many of them seemed to only have logged in to research their “Google’s latest sucks because I’m so brilliant” article. It was hillariously tragic.

After spending an entire day in Lively yesterday, I’ve decided something: anyone claiming to be a virtual worlds expert that doesn’t think Lively is going to rule has no idea what they’re talking about. If you haven’t already, click on the picture below to download the client or log into the meeting space I made earlier.

3 Bad Things

1. It’s cartoony. It’s low-res with no real physics engine. This means you won’t be recreating the perfect golf simulator here - but it also means fantastic framerates, low bandwidth, and no probability of falling off of something.
2. You can’t create content. Yet. They’ve stated that it will be opened up soon, but that part wasn’t ready for launch. Instead you have to use the pre-fab stuff and assemble it all like a dollhouse… well, a dollhouse that can play video, audio, can display web-hosted pictures, and make anything clickable. Of course, it will accept custom content… and when it does, look out. Google Sketchup + 3D warehouse = more free customizable content than you can imagine.
3. It’s not a world. Instead, it’s individual rooms. You can get from one room to another via regular http link, and you can make anything clickable to facilitate that, but the rooms themselves aren’t “joined”. If you really feel a dire need to look out a window and see people pass by, that’s a problem. Of course, you CAN be in as many rooms as you want all at once with a single account and avatar.

5 Good Things

1. It’s easy. I mean really, really easy. If you can click-drag, you can do everything. My eight year old daughter was making rooms and interacting in no time.
2. It’s fast. I mean really, really fast. Rooms load up from scratch in just a few moments, and even on our very old busted up laptop we get fantastic framerates.
3. It handles overload. Most platforms die a horrible death when you overload them. Lively just makes new people who enter the room over the limit “observers” without avatars.
4. It actually works. Face it: most platforms launch broken. While there are still bugs to squash, the fact that it actually works with 20 people in the room at once is amazing. Just imagine what it will do in a year.
5. It’s Google. Remember how Google Reader launched, and everybody thought it was just idiotic compared to Bloglines? Google kept fixing it, improving it, making it easier, faster better… you have to be die-hard to stick with Bloglines now. Imagine what they’re going to roll out next with Lively. It already integrates with the web, and Google has a history of integrating everything they do. Think about the services they already own that could be integrated here: GTalk, the Sketchup library, Google Documents… they’ve already done some rudimentary integration of YouTube and Picasa.

1 Conclusion

This is it; the big show in virtual worlds. Never mind Second Life, it has its applications for the time being, but it isn’t the future. Log into Lively now.

Posted on July 11th, 2008 under futurism, new media, platforms. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.