Google Lively is [Insert Bad Pun Here]

According to the official Google Blog , Google Lively will be closed down at the end of the year.

I always found the idea of Google Lively to be a somewhat unusual idea for the company. While I have plenty of respect for Google and Virtual Worlds are of major interest to me,  the idea never really seemed to fit the overarching goal of organizing the world’s information, which the company has always pushed as their primary objective. Then again, Google has also certainly been a company prone to experimentation, and it was interesting to see what they could do in this technological space.

Google hasn’t seemed to state why they’re cutting Lively off, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the current economic state of the US had a bit to do with it, and I don’t doubt that Lively was a fairly costly thing to keep running. Still given all of that, I’m surprised Google didn’t do more with the product.

Luckily, for those feeling a bit displaced by the loss of the virtual environment, I tend to agree with Raph Koster’s post on the subject – this is a still growing field.