If Lively had Viagra, Vitoria's Secret, Ann Summers, Private and Rampant Rabbit ads then it would have been a knuckle-shuffling success!

Paris, she's neither virtual or virtuous.

I recently dumped a HUGE number of Sims 'virtual land' in Second Life and quit the game due in part to the continued incompetence of Linden Lab. There are so many fundamental deficiences I wouldn't know where to begin. Uninstalling Second Life after two years was a breathe of fresh air! I haven't looked back for a microsecond.

R.I.P Lively.

Ok, so it's a negative story - something is closing down, didn't live up to expectations etc etc, but do you have to take such a negative tone in your journalism, or rather, 'reporting'?

Describing the current economic downturn as a 'clusterfxxk' is just base, playground level articulation and reveals the level of your intellect.

"Despite its famous corporate hubris, Google didn't have the Ponzi-esque cojones to flog "virtual land" to gullible strategy boutiques and people in unhappy marriages, as Linden Lab does in Sadville."

Classic!

Yeah the deficiencies must have been *very* fundamental to keep you on there for 2 years :p

I would have expected at least Google to get a clue and offer VR as a form of Virtual Office. They had the technical resources to do that. There is a big market for that especially with all the restrictions companies have placed on travel during the downturn.

However, instead of creating something useful they did a "me-too" and provided participants no means of secure link, no means of purchasing walled garden environment and most importantly, they did not grant the participants full IP rights on anything they create in the VR.

Without these, the corporations are not likely to try to use a VR as a VO anytime soon and not surprisingly the sole VR we will have will be Sadville with its sad marriages between people who need extra-wide doors in their houses for the rare occasions when the inhabitants need to get out.

"Are [people with niche sexual interests] likely to be a target for major advertisers? Erm, no"

Et pourquoi non?

Heinz ketchup

Unilever Vaseline

Swarfega

Mars Pedigree Petfoods

Taser International, Inc.

I could go on...

I'm happy with the phrase "current economic clusterfuck" .... seems to sum up where we are fairly accurately.

Just had a look at this "lively" thing... and would you believe it...

"Requires Windows Vista/XP with Internet Explorer or Firefox "

So, no Chrome support then? When will the corporate world realise these virtual worlds are not a long term strategy to make money. Places like sadville just make a few people rich by exploiting the vulnerable and stupid idiots out there. Linden Labs claime to have something like 2 million accounts... but I think they're including the 1.99 million people like me that created and account, ran around a laggy world for 10 minutes and then uninstalled it.

No, no, I think this is one of the best articles I've seen on TheRegister in quite some time. Everyone knew that Lively was badly done, Chris Williams does a great job of presenting the facts (or let's say prevailing opinion) in a humorous yet cynical way. Excellent job CW. :)

Quite untrue. You had to download a Windows-only browser plugin, which had this terribly annoying habit of making sure that I always had a URL shortcut to lively.com on my desktop (which it would recreate every day).

..would be for everyone to sign up so they think there's sudden demand and announce to keep it going. Then all cancel our accounts on January 01, 2009 :-)