I somewhat disagree about this not being very "Googley." Although Lively is very different than the Google homepage in terms of presentation; both share the same ends of organizing the world's information and making it accessible. Google's press release blog post about Lively suggests, "In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text [[hug]]" [1]. Perhaps in some abstract sense, Lively allows users to store and present information that is difficult to disseminate via text or other currently available methods. On the other hand, maybe it's just Google's way of making money on a perceived market that is the intersection between video gamers and Facebookers.

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

I'm unimpressed, I was expecting Google Earth to become their virtual world product.

Creating their own virtual worlds gives them access to their own real (virtual) estate that they can plaster with ads.

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.

>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.

Um, I work at Google, and I know people that have come into the office once in the past six months.

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

This is just not true.

Well thats good to hear (I only know people in Sydney and Mountain View offices, and they tell me they didn't know anyone that worked like that).

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).

anyone else noted that lively uses facebook account as default?

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

Perhaps it would seem more Googly if it were called "Google Rooms" instead of Lively.