Google Introduces Lively.com And Virtual Chat Rooms

Google Lively is the latest application released from the minds at Google. Lively is a free program that lets you create a virtual room on your website that can be styled any way you choose. Because of its ability to enrich the online chatting experience, Google Lively is likely to replace the text only chat rooms to which we have all grown accustomed over the next couple of years. Lively lets you choose an avatar or character to represent yourself in the chat room. Just like in real life you can walk around in the virtual, engage specific individuals in conversation, and have a much richer and more "Lively" experience than is offered through just plain chat.

Creating your Google Lively Avatar

Google offers Lively software as a free download from lively.com. The program is relatively small and took just about a minute to download and fully install on my system. Once the Google Lively software is installed, you will need to create your own avatar. The avatar is just a representation of you in the Lively virtual world. You can choose from several stock characters and then customize your hair and wardrobe until your avatar presents the image you want people to see. There are a number of built in actions that your avatar can perform, so instead of typing in ROTFL, now you avatar will actually roll on the floor laughing.

Building a Google Lively Room

After you have created an avatar, you can tour existing rooms or build one of your own. Building a room is quick and easy. Here's an example of one that I built in about a minute. Feel free to stop by and chat. Lively rooms can be built around a variety of shells or basic layouts. Google offers everything from a high-tech superhero command room to a deserted island. From there you can add furniture or other items to make the room seem like a friendlier place to hold a discussion. The room options even let you choose background music for your room.

Talking in the Lively Virtual Room

To talk in the Lively room, you just type your message into the ordinary chat window and hit enter. A cartoon-like speech bubble appears above your avatar for others in the room to read. The actions you choose for your avatar during the discussion help convey your mood to the other people in the room. Lively.com has an option to find and visit the most popular rooms so you can always find someone with whom to chat.

Adding a Virtual Room to Your Website

Once you have created a room, Google Lively offers simple cut and paste html code that lets you embed your virtual room on your website. Your website can have virtual rooms dedicated to discussions related to the topic of your website. You can even hold virtual meetings with real-time question and answer sessions. Expect these Google Lively virtual rooms to start appearing on blogs and web pages all over the internet.

The Future of Google Lively

At present, there are limited choices for room shells, avatars, wardrobe, furniture and so forth for the Lively virtual world. We can expect, though, that enterprising individuals will soon be offering custom items for sale at lively.com, much like the virtual economy that has flourished in the popular virtual world Second Life. Second Life may be in for a tough road ahead with the introduction of Google Lively. So far, true to most everything Google does, Google Lively is completely free. I wonder how long it will be before you can sell virtual ad space in your Lively Room. If I know Google, it won't be long. Try it out at lively.com and let us know what future possibilities you see for lively.com.