Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Google’s 3D world Lively, announced just last year, was abruptly discontinued on January 1st after being live just a couple of months. Their homepage is now displaying a good-bye message. If you had embedded rooms, they will now show a crowd ofhand-waving and attitude striking avatars

Unofficially, a contender for a replacement sprung up from an unlikely source – 3D developers in Beijing, China. New Lively runs as an exe-powered plug-in to your browser and looks remarkably like the beginning of a Lively clone. Legally, Googl;e could probably sue – although they seem not to have any incentive.

The New Lively creators – who say they “work in various fields of 3D and computer programming” – explain their motivation behind creating this clone in their FAQ:

We created Newlively for three reasons:

1) to restore Lively users their lost cyberspace;
2) to put our strengths to test whether our executive management are functional;
3) to test and prove to ourselves that our skills and abilities are in fact cutting-edge.

The FAQ states that the program was put through production very quickly: “From decision-making to the release of the trial version, it took approximately one month.”

Lucasfilm’s Habitat from 1988 was an early experiment in creating an online social world. However, the 500 users of the prototype ate up a full 1% of the system resources of partnering online provider QuantumLink. Although the project was later licensed to others, spun off successors and might have influenced other virtual world such as DreamScape and newHorizone, the US release of Habitat was canceled.

The fascination of the American public with games such as Sims indicates that there is a market – it simply comes back around once again to ROI and the ability to monetoze social network possibilities.