Google have this philosophy of putting products into beta early in the development phase and ironing out the problems as they go. It’s not going to work with Lively in the virtual world/game space. People are not going to come back. Ask the owners of Second Life. They lose 9/10 people who try it and those 9 do not come back. Despite its dumbed down functionality, Lively will lose at least 9.

Rooms are supposed to contain 20 avatars. Mostly they close with about 12 and lag badly.

People in the environment have NO IDEA what they’re meant to do. What’s worse, there IS nothing to do, other than chat. A large number of people are 14 years old, speak different languages or lag so badly they cannot communicate. Believe me, there’s not a lot of chemistry in there. Didn’t Google study the Second Life orientation experience?

Most of the people I was able to communicate with had computer problems in Lively and were Facebook users. The idea that people are going to migrate their friends’ network across from Facebook is just fanciful. Only one in three are going to have sufficient graphics grunt and bandwidth to make it run tolerably. What are they going to do, stay in Facebook with all their friends or jump across to Lively leaving most of their friends behind? That was a rhetorical question.

I went into Vivaty as well but after it insisted on re-installing the software it packed up completely. Able to display only one room of those I tried. Like Heidi said in her comment; Just Starting.

Pictured: Me in Lively, streaming Lisa Nova’s Twitter Whore video into my room, Twittery.

Lively is described as Google’s answer to Second Life. It’s not. Second Life is a virtual world; Lively is chat software with 3D avatars. It’s browser-based, as opposed to Second Life, which operates with separate software, like a computer game. Contrasting the two environments highlights the originality of the Second Life product. Lively is imitative and cut-down in every respect. Conceptually barren. This is by intention; the Second Life interface has proved too daunting for most people. I note that they used to think that computers were too complicated for the mainstream too.

The interesting aspect of Lively is the ability to embed the interface in a web page, effectively offering interactive 3D chat on a web site. For a business, this has the same limitations of normal chat software, ie it only works if you allocate staff to interact with people. Kind of the opposite to what businesses tend to want these days. You can imagine teleseminars and teleconferences working this way, if they get the wrinkles ironed out.

And there are a lot of wrinkles. It’s painfully slow. There is no orientation. Things don’t work. Movement is difficult. Thousands of bad first impressions are being created as you read this. This is no way to run a ballroom.

My friends at Millions of Us are one of two development partners and have created a themed room for one of their clients, National Geographic. So; themed rooms, limit of 20 visitors at a time: looks like a similar scaling problem to Second Life’s.

Lively’s launch has overwhelmed another entrant in this space. Vivaty. It is easier to understand, is less ambitious than Lively and seems to work better, though I haven’t seen it under load.

Vivaty also allows you to embed your room in a web page (coincidence). Like Lively, it offers to suck you across from Facebook (just a coincidence). Quite an unsettling experience walking into your Vivaty room for the first time to find the walls covered with pictures of people you know. It loads pictures randomly from your Facebook account.

But most people I know don’t dwell in Facebook. It’s a ‘touch base’ medium. This is at odds with the 3D chat idea, which is conversation. I would have thought the concept was a better fit with MSN than Facebook.

Always risky making an assessment early on, but here goes. Lively will disappoint almost everyone who ventures into it, will get a reputation as nothing special and die of embarrassment. Vivaty will struggle to move people across from Facebook in sufficient numbers to give it traction. Both are kludgy and compare poorly to their 2D rivals.

Not through to the next round.