• GigaOm, Wednesday, July 9, 2008 11:45 AM

After 18 months of persistent rumors, Google finally launched its Second Life rival, unveiling a virtual world known as Lively on Tuesday. Sort of. GigaOm's Wagner James Au says Lively is more like "a series of virtual world chatrooms" than a "contiguous, immersive, fully user-created metaverse" like Second Life. Either way, he says, "Lively seems too similar to several existing (and very large) MMOs, making it an also-ran without a key market distinguisher to be truly compelling (besides being from Google)."

That said, you can do some cool things with these chatrooms, like embed them on your Web site, but ultimately, the cutesy, cartoonish avatars and classic virtual world feel amount to little that's original, Au says. "Without some special magic that I'm not seeing as yet, it could easily wind up being a virtual world version of Google Video, easily eclipsed by the YouTube-level dominance of Habbo Hotel/Club Penguin/Gaia Online/etc."

Then there's the 64 million dollar question: Why is Google, the Web's leading search provider, getting into virtual worlds in the first place? How does this fit in their world domination plan to organize all the world's information?

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