Who Broke Google Lively?
As a matter of practice I try my best to keep my criticisms positive when it comes to emerging technology, but Google Lively is starting to seem like a lemon. After a flurry of activity and scattered enthusiasm amongst early adopters in the wake of the launch of the so-called SecondLife killer, Lively has failed to impress ever since.
Discussions have emerged across the blogosphere about how unacceptable a PC-only virtual world is, and now it would seem that Lively is having issues on PCs as well.
As I discuss in the Seesmic clip embedded above, Lively has ceased to work for me - full stop. I was able to login and create an island initially, experiment and design my avatar, and begin to evaluate the functionality - however as of 18 hours or so ago this has ground to a halt.
Now when I try to access a room in Lively - ANY room - I’m told that “Firefox can’t find the server at embed.lively.com”. I’m told to check for typos along with several other things - including my firewall settings - but everything is in order. Despite the fact nothing has changed, I can no longer use the service.
Now Lively is of course a Google Labs project, which means it has no formal support, nor any way to report bugs. There is a Google group devoted to the project, but a quick perusal of the posts and threads makes it clear that there are more disgruntled users than there are answers.
I still firmly believe there is tremendous potential for Lively in the scheme of things, but this will only occur if Google starts to give the application - and particularly its users - adequate attention. Otherwise what initially appeared to be a promising offering will quickly shrivel and die on the vine.
Update (12 July @ noon): Things seem to be working again. Let’s hope it’s going to stay that way.
Update (13 July): Nevermind, it’s broken again.
Friday, July 11th, 2008