Tech Junky

Google Lively is an online 3D social arena just like the popular Second Life virtual world. With Lively, you can set up your own online spaces: rooms, desert islands, grassy meadows and much more. You can change the clothing or form of your avatar. And of course you can chat, do backflips, shake hands, and give high-fives.

Just like Second Life, Lively also requires users to download and install a separate “client” software package that connects you to the online world but there’s a major difference between the two. For Lively, people can use Internet Explorer or Firefox to enter the virtual world. It’s integration with the ordinary Internet proves to be quite beneficial. You can bring in content like photos or videos hosted elsewhere on the Web. You can even embed your Lively world into your blog or on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace using the widgets Google has written.

Lively is different from Second Life in a number of ways. It doesn’t have any money and is designed to be easier to use, with a drag-and-drop interface. For now, it’s not programmable. Thus you can select clothes, furniture, hairstyles etc. only from the ones Google supplies to you.

Currently, Lively is available only on the Windows platform. A Mac OS X client is one thing that Google would surely bring out. Money and programmability are also the items the company is seriously considering.

Enter the Google Lively virtual world ..