Google’s virtual world platform, Lively, will foreclose on the 31^st of December. This was announced by Google on their blog.

Lively was launched by Google in July 2008, a mere four months ago. Apparently time enough to realise the service doesn’t work.

Lively is a virtual world platform where users can create their own incarnations and personalised rooms with several tools, that are free to try, and publish them on websites with an HTML code inlay.

Users communicated with each other by entering and gathering in the rooms of others, these, like any other chat room, could be public or private. They could even be decorated collectively.

Following the launch, everyone found similarities with Second Life (which isn’t precisely going through a good patch), but the truth is that any similarity with SL ended when you left a room as it didn’t allow you to wander around a complete virtual world, the way to move from one room to another was by surfing Lively’s website and selecting one from a list.

Another attempt by Google to take part in something slightly successful. In this case, they competed clearly with Second Life, which as I said, stopped being news months ago.

I have read articles that speak of total failure, dead-ly, etc. In my mind, Google did what they had to do, explore new markets and platforms with a possible market and a mass of users requesting it. In this instance it didn’t work out but, what are 4 months of work and investment for a company like Google? Pocket change.

But Lively isn’t the only problem, general virtual worlds are at a low, the only exception being the hugely successful World of Warcraft that is growing daily and is an incredible money making machine. But in this instance we are talking about a massive game with an almost permanent virtual world where every object is a jewel, precious objects that have sold on ebay for astronomical prices.

And the users, to communicate on a daily basis, prefer to use the old systems, like, e-mail, forums and chat rooms (virtual). You only need to take a look at Gmail and Groups statistics for the past year.

When a free service forecloses, the user conditions (that we never read) warn that they could foreclose whenever with no explanations or commitment, logical for a free service. The users who had scrupulously worked rooms and incarnations will no longer have them in 2009.

To say farewell to the service, Google has proposed to make captures and videos of their rooms to keep as a souvenir.