Check out this amazing app called AlternativaPlatform (Disclaimer: They not friends of mine and I don't have any connection.) if you want to see what's possible for 3D using just regular Flash 9. It's the most impressive example that I've seen so far. The link goes to their blog, which contains a bunch of demos:

http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/

This is another really cool Flash 9 - based 3D app: http://ecodazoo.com/ (Disclaimer: No personal or financial connections here either.)

Maybe there are some technical requirements that I'm not aware of the necessitated using a custom plugin. Assuming that there was a good reason for it, why didn't they integrate it into an update for their Google Toolbar product or the Google Earth browser plugin? I'd be curious to hear any ideas on the subject.

http://www.realityprime.com/articles/google-lively

"Ah, finally, we get to see the long rumored Google Virtual World, or one of them anyway. There’s also rumored to be another one with a remarkably similar aesthetic that’s only 2D and doesn’t require a plugin and install. [I imagine they could use this 3D technology on the server side to flatten their avatars into isometric sprites that could be rendered in Flash or AJAX, ala google maps on the client. Any bets?]"

*Avi founded Keyhole which built what eventually became Google Earth

An article linked from the realityprime.com article that you listed has an interesting quote:

Our mandate was to get usage," Guymon (note: Mel Guymon, Google's Head of 3D Operations [and former There.com developer and IMVU Co-Founder]) said of his business plan. "The difference from the startups I’ve been in is that startups have to turn a profit or die. All the projects in Google are run as startups, but we’re given an incredibly amount of rope to be successful. We’re not about to run out of money and die. For Google it’s the opportunity to get into a space that we think is really going to be important in the long term. For me personally, I think this is going to make people’s online experiences richer and more interesting. For generations coming up from age 4, this is what they expect. For Google, that was really the stake in the road"

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/07/google-announce.htm...

Any thoughts? To me it sounds like they're a bit undisciplined. I'm not sure that it's a recipe for success to just throw money at a project. Constraints often help shape a product in good ways. In this particular example, it could have been a good thing if they didn't have enough programming resources to build and test their own plugin. They would have had to live within the limitations of the flash plugin, but that tradeoff could prove in retrospect to have been well worth it.

With something like JOGL or LWJGL, you get hardware accelerated 3D that's supported on Windows, Linux, OS X and Solaris and that will 'just play' in about 95% of surfers out there.

If you want to see what you can do with it, Runescape's new HD client came out recently and it looks beautiful (and runs damned quick).

Anyhow, I still haven't seen any compelling reasons to use Java that are so incredible that they outweigh these serious shortcomings. I think it's just a total non-starter. And with Flash starting to now support hardware 3D acceleration with Flash 10, there is one less reason to use Java.

A few years ago Google was doing awesome new cool stuff... significantly better search, advertising products, cutting edge JavaScript stuff like Google Maps and Gmail, etc.

Now they just seem to be copying things others have done first, like Open Social, Android, App Engine, and now Lively.

2. Even if you ask an engineer what his or her dream product is, it's often something like "(existing thing) done right".

3. How do you know that your other examples won't turn out to be as innovative? It took Google years to figure out search advertising. You just think that Google miraculously produced perfect software the first time around, because you weren't paying as much attention before.

But I will grant you one point. The old Google had a rule that they wouldn't get into a market unless they thought they had a chance of being 10x better than anyone else. It's hard to believe that Lively is going to be 10x better than the other social MMOs.

Are there any products they've made that are really new, versus done better? I can't think of any, though I'm sure there must be a few.

I'm sure it's a well-polished product, and that it'll be popular with teenage girls, but "popular with teenage girls" isn't usually google's goal, is it?

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/be-who-you-want-on-we...

Avatar based chats are probably better than existing text-in-a-window ones for multi-person conversations because of the ease with which we can localize and assign voices to faces. I'd consider this the first significant step (by Google) in doing away with physical co-location of office workers.

You mean starting with themselves? Google are very much old school in terms of making people work in regular (ish) offices, partly through culture and partly through the need for hush hush security.

> Google are very much old school in terms of making people work in regular (ish) offices

This is just not true.

Of course its nice to have good offices to go to when you so choose. Its just I know that when I go to an office I normally get nothing done (its almost too social).

http://www.lively.com/help/bin/answer.py?answer=98532&sr...

Boo.

Maybe that's a generalization too far, but it seems like it should be so.

If not, I agree, this is bad news for them, because hundreds more are coming.

Regardless, this service isn't all that new. There are lots of characters created in the summer 2007 timeframe linked from the Catalog page (like http://www.lively.com/catalog/details?mid=-84971956863432942...).

Google is learning to do business the Microsoft way. Make an offer ONCE. They don't take it . . . make an example of them. The next startup you want will take the money, even if you are lowballing them.

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/07/google-announce.htm...

google has just "jumped the shark."

Google uses facebook accounts?

http://www.lively.com/help/bin/answer.py?answer=98532&sr...

wtf??

I'll be playing with Lively in the morning behind the firewall.

I'm still waiting for the metaverse where I can accomplish real tasks in a pseudo-natural way.