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.
September 11th, 2008 at 4:21 am
Hello Mike, stumbled across your site through the Connectivism thread. i’m fascinated by the seesmic app you’re using to have conversations.
.. and no i could never get Lively to work either. (on a windows box.)
it sounded so promising, didn’t it.
kind regards, michael
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September 11th, 2008 at 4:35 am
Hi Michael,
Yeah Lively has definitely had some teething problems to contend with. I’m still keeping my eye on it because it’s got some advantages going for it - not the least of which are ease of use and embeddable instances (including use in Facebook). But the fact it’s PC-only and prone to unexpected outages make it pretty unreliable for most people at the moment.
It desperately needs audio chat and support for user-created objects though. Until both of them are implemented I suspect it won’t be taken too seriously. Nonetheless I’m still going to keep an eye on it.
Seesmic on the other hand is definitely worth a look. I quite like actually being able to see who I’m talking to and I think it could go a long way to reduce some of the feelings of isolation that were expressed during the 2nd Elluminate session held today.
If you need any assistance getting started with it please let me know. I’ve added a short tutorial on how to set-up your audio and video to the “CCK08 Students on Seesmic” post I wrote a week or so ago.
If it’s useful I’d be happy to record another one that does a more comprehensive overview.
Cheers,
Mike
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