Google has launched yesterdays is “second life” project named Lively. Obviously, a Google account is needed and it is a beta version as GMail since March 21 2004.
As Google is new in the virtual worlds area and a challenger of Second Life from Linden Research (created in June 23 2003 with approximately 13 million accounts registered all around the world in March 2008).
Lively enhances the virtual universe by integrating some new interesting and some funny features. First, Lively is presented as an Firefox and Internet Explorer add-on/extension. Then, you have around 30 virtual worlds. Like Second Life, you can customize almost everything, from your avatar to your own universe. More, you are able to add some videos using YouTube on virtual TV set or movie theater wide screen.
The stand out innovation in Lively comes through the availability to integrate/export your universe on your blog, on your Facebook profile or on your MySpace page. Then, you can connect and have some discussions with your “friends” or connections or guest visitors on the website.
But, there is ä but. Google Lively plug-in is only available for Windows XP SP2 and Vista OS. The Mac OS X and Linux users will have to wait as usual.
I think it will be interesting to integrate Google Sketchup within Lively to have also the ability to create our own furniture, apparels and accessories catalogs or integrate 3rd application such as SquareClock technology to design our our own “rooms” and “places” libraries. We can also imagine a professional/enterprise version of Lively mixing Google Adsense features to create virtual showrooms of your company and your products such as Sobuzzy is proposing or virtual office like the IBM one in Second Life.
source: Google
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