Google Takes A Stab at the Social Networking Market With Lively.com
By Kevin Cheng | Filed under: Google, For Fun, Social Media Marketing
Google has just launched a new social network site similar to Second Life called Lively. This virtual world allows users to create their own avatar, customize their own rooms, invite their friends to visit and chat in the room, and even display their favourite Youtube videos on the plasma TV.
It is similar to an online game, where users can chat and show emotion in a virtual world. When you type in some pre-defined words like “hello” and “wave”, your avatar would wave their hands, or in my case, my pig avatar “small jue” would hop and flap its ears and arms. Users are also able to embed their favourite images from Picasa and videos from YouTube to their plasma TV furniture.
At this moment, there’s no option for the users to import their friend lists from other places, but it is definitely on Google’s agenda. Once your room is created, you could embed the room into other sites using iframe.
According to Google, this Lively project was the fruit of their famous 80/20 project, where the employees would spend 20% of their work time to work on their own personal fun, creative little projects.
Although this really has little to do with SEO at the moment, I still think it is yet another interesting and ambitious product from Google. Don’t forget to check out my Lively room before you go!
Update:
So I have played with it for a night or so, helping my girl friend to create her room. Lively, for what it is right now, really does deserve to have the “beta” tag attached to it. Not that it is totally broken or unplayable, but it does have a few bugs here and there. It does, however, show us its revenue generating potential in the future with its YouTube and Picasa integration. When user generated content like furniture and tools are (assuming) to be added in the future, imagine adding a cup of Starbucks coffee or some Ikea furniture to your den.
Also, not surprisingly, some quick thinking people have already invaded the site with sexual oriented rooms and many of those rooms have made it to the home page as the most visited sites.
