Google has announced that Lively is going away at year's end.
I'm sad to see it go; ethical competition is a great thing and the engine of progress. I hope that LL has a fire lit under its figurative posterior by things like Nurien, HiPiHi, and OpenSim, so that our graphics get to be as good as Nurien's and it becomes as easy to terraform as the movies of HiPiHi make it look. (And how 'bout that OpenLife R16 client?)
But Lively didn't seem all that great. A set of rooms sounds like something that Isaac Asimov or his fictional detective, Lije Baley, would love, but it seems claustrophobic to me. Worse still, no user-created content, which is what sets SL apart. Besides, with a Linux version only promised, it is/was of no use to me.
Google doesn't have a monopoly it can leverage to force Lively down everyone's throat, so they've chosen to close it down. (Hmmm... I wonder if they'd consider releasing it as open source, so all that work doesn't go to waste?)
P.S. I recall talk of Google being the 800 pound gorilla that would steamroller other virtual worlds, in particular SL. Guess it didn't turn out that way.
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