So, Google Lively is closing down at the end of the year.
Does it matter?
Not really. Although many people spoke about ‘validation’ in the industry by Google entering the VW space, there was no fundamental strategy in place. And validation isn’t really important because it’s the kids using the other popular worlds who are driving adoption today and more importantly taking us to new frontiers in the future.
People spoke about the brandopportunitiesin Lively. These didn’t materialise. After all, it’s a short list of brands that would want their rooms listed next to sex clubs. Plus, branded rooms is a throw-back to the marketing disasters we saw in Second Life in 2007.
They didn’t really understand their target market for Lively either. Who were they targeting? Did they even know?
Graphically, it looked like a clone of IMVU, without the 20m+ registered accounts or circa 2m virtual goods of course.
It wasn’t really a Google fit anyway. Google is great at managing other peoples content but the UGC elements of Lively were missing.
Maybe they should revert to a plan B. Here’s one I wrote 14 months ago.
Here’s what Cary Rosenzweig (CEO) from IMVU has to say:
“We regret to hear that Google will be closing Lively. We welcomed them asfriendly competitors.
Creating a successful virtual world is not easy. You need to build acompelling 3D experience, and you need a viable business model to supportthat experience. IMVU has been learning from customers for almost five
years, and our product has evolved based on intense customer input over along time.
IMVU is doing very well. We are on track in November to have our best monthever from a business perspective. The second-best month ever was last month(October).”