Yesterday Google launched a new social networking tool (like we need another one). It’s called Lively and although it is a social networking tool it’s got a new twist to it that makes it interesting. See the promotional video below. Then read my review
At first glance the website Lively.com is not appealing, it’s got a mediocre layout and if it wasn’t for the logo at the top left you wouldn’t even know it was owned and operated by Google. The page is bland with no much color or style. Nothing explains what Lively is; only a download link at the top seems important.
Once you download the app the adventure beings. You sign in using your faithful Google account and then you are given a chance to select your avatar. This is perhaps the first disappointing aspect of Lively. There are only 10 styles of avatar to choose from and 3 of them are animals; you get a small selection of clothing and apparel to the “dress” your avatar with but not nearly enough for the thousands of users that will be using this application in the near future. If they don’t provide more options for avatars soon, it will be hard to distinguish different users. After a few seconds of searching and sorting I finished Jose.Gomez.
After you have created your avatar you can venture into the many pre-created rooms or create your own. For the purpose of this review I decided to join a pre-existing room (I am still trying to do just that). All joking aside, the servers seems to be bogged down to the max, there are almost no rooms with enough space for you to join and if you create your own room then nobody comes. Finally after much poking around I was able to join a room with 2 or 3 people in it. It took me about 20 minutes to master how to interact with this application. It has a horrible interface and no keyboard support. You must move by dragging your avatar around and by combining the horrible neck breaking camera angle functionality common in most games these days. However no w a s d or arrow keys do anything for you. It is 100% centered on the mouse; this for me is a horrible defect that must be solved immediately. There are many people out there including me that would much rather work with the keyboard
There is nothing particularly interesting to do in these rooms, you can chat with other avatars (Yeah REAL Ground Breaking Stuff) and you can perform certain actions like, hug, kiss, kick, punch etc. There were a few things I was impressed by.
- In the TV sets inside the rooms you can stream videos from youtube
- In the Picture Frames inside the rooms you can place your own pictures
- Lively will automatically recognize many of the common Internet lingo and will do an action based on it. For example LoL will make the avatar Laugh and slap his/her knees.
Besides the above mentioned “perks” Lively is nothing but a time waster. It’s a bad copy of second life or any of the other “social networking tools” in 3D. It needs to be developed much more in order for it to become a hit. Although being a product from Google I do not doubt that sometime soon they will do something awesome like integrate it with Google earth and then you can live in your own house in Google earth and stuff like that. For now it is just another application bugging down the Internet.
On a side note I was VERY disappointed when I found several Sex oriented rooms. Google has always been very good at protecting their users in youtube, picasa, and any other service they provide. This time they let the ball drop.
Lively is such a rip-off of IMVU.