
Google's Lively Will Be Shut Down - peter123
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/lively-no-more.html
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peter123
Google should open-source the project and let the community take over and
continue development.

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chollida1
They probably can't in any way that would make it usable to people.

As Steve Yegge always points out when he talks about open sourcing his Google
side projects, Most of it depends on other Google technology that isn't open
source.

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jrockway
_As Steve Yegge always points out when he talks about open sourcing his Google
side projects, Most of it depends on other Google technology that isn't open
source._

That doesn't really prevent you from open-sourcing it. The Google-specific
parts can be replaced by someone who cares.

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chollida1
That's why this sentence was put first.

> They probably can't in any way that would make it usable to people.

No worries:)

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jrockway
My point was, "show us the code anyway, we'll decide what is and isn't
usable".

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peter123
there were some bad decisions, chief among which was the decision to NOT to
use flash as the platform. Kinda the same mistake they made with the original
Google Video.

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axod
Surely these days they could pretty much have used javascript, with canvas
etc. No flash==even bigger win.

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palish
Why?

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axod
Because the new crop of internet devices don't have flash?

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teej
And they somehow support Canvas?

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blasdel
Yes. WebKit _invented_ <canvas>.

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est
Every new toy requires a browser plugin will DIE

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sahaj
i honestly think that this was mainly setup in anticipation for the yahoo-
google ad deal. yahoo would've been able to bring all the yahoo games to
lively with a fresh new interface. the whole idea behind lively was that you
can use lively as a virtual room to do other stuff, such as listening to
music, watching videos, playing games, etc.

maybe i'm thinking too much about this, but i would've loved to see the yahoo-
google partnership happen. it would've meant that google gets to distribute
and leverage it's huge ad selling platform over yahoo, in return for higher
yield and revenues for yahoo - good for both parties. i think if microsoft
buys yahoo, the whole web will continue towards a downwards path where users
get less and less. i'm not against microsoft, but it's just that their
business is vast and has a huge eco-system. microsoft will partner with many
traditional media companies and service providers, who will want to run the
web their own way.

thoughts?

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sgk284
I was working at Google when lively was still just a one man 20% project. It
didn't start in anticipation of anything, it was just a guy having fun and he
eventually got enough momentum internally to garner official interest in it.
The one thing I remember though is that there seemed to be a big internal
debate about the whole concept being cheesy and out of scope for Google.
Generally though google will embrace just about anything internally.

As for the ad deal, I'd have loved to seen it go through but don't have
anything really insightful to add.

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shimi
Would be interesting to see if someone can learn from Googles experience and
implement a similar service that will be more successful.

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crabapple
i commend them for experimenting

i also commend them for shutting it off when the experiment has failed

if you want to grow new products, you have to engage this process

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mixmax
If they promote the guy that had the idea and got it off the ground they're
really onto something.

