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Let there be Lively

Having conquered the real world, Google has created a virtual one. But will we want to live there?

A room with a view: Google's new world

Yesterday, virtual worlds such as Habbo Hotel and Second Life, in which people interact with each other through their alter egos, or avatars, were niche markets, albeit very large ones; today, they may be on the road to becoming a mass phenomenon.

Why? Because Google, the most popular search engine on the planet, with a massive fan base, has moved in with its own virtual world, Lively (For the moment it is only on Pcs, not on Apple computers).

The world offers users their own "virtual" rooms, which they can kit out from an inventory of armchairs, tables and lamp stands. I found it easy to do this; and to pull down a TV set from the inventory, then click on it and insert the web address of a YouTube video, which then started playing inside my virtual apartment. Rooms can be either private or public so all your friends, and strangers as well, can come and chat.

As is Google's style, it didn't spend a cent on advertising: it just quietly added Lively to its list of services and allowed the rest of the world do the marketing for it – yes, as I am doing now.

When I dipped into it yesterday, I was unimpressed: just a mass of cartoony characters in makeshift rooms saying "Hi" to each other as if imprisoned in their comic balloons. For anyone used to the creativity of Second Life, it all looked elementary.

Then it dawned on me: most of them had probably never been in a virtual world before. All of the other worlds - and there are more than 100 of them - have been start-ups coming from nowhere and are often too complex to navigate through (though not the new generation aimed at youngsters); this one is simple.

And, more to the point, this is the first virtual world to be launched using the leverage of a company whose icon is on the screen of well over 70% of the world's computers. This doesn't guarantee success, but Google hopes it has found the common denominator of virtual worlds. Google has had plenty of failures, but mass leverage isn't exactly a handicap.

When I went back on to Lively this morning, newcomers were already getting the hang of it, with well furnished rooms, bars, discos, chess games and, inevitably, erotica appearing all over the place and in many different languages, a sign of Google's global reach. There are already ominous signs of "lag", when your room takes ages to "rez", or materialise; and rooms get filled petty quickly, so it is not always possible to get into the popular ones.

Like others, I was caught on the hop with this announcement. A virtual world has been expected from Google for yonks, but a lot of the speculation presumed it would be glued on to Google Earth. Maybe that is still a work in progress. I had written a tour d'horizon of virtual worlds, which appears in today's Technology Guardian, including the Finnish Habbo Hotel and the British RuneScape, both of which claim more than 100m registrations, and the article went to press the day before Google's announcement (or non-announcement).

What does all this mean? For Google, this is a new direction. The company is built on searching other people's content, whether text, photos or videos. Now, for the first time on a big scale, it is putting its own content up, though user-generated material will inevitably follow when they have built up experience.

Second, users can embed Lively on their own websites or blogs, so they don't have to go to a different screen to enter a virtual world because now it has converged with the real world.

They are all just different ways of connecting with other people. This won't stop critics of virtual world devotees asking: "Why don't you get a real life?" But it is a major step towards breaking barriers.

Most of the three-dimensional projects in the pipeline, such as metaplace.com, are trying to do two things: merge virtual worlds with the rest of the web and make them interoperable, so you can move from one world to another, in contrast to the present "walled garden" approach, in which avatars can't move from World of Warcraft to Entropia Universe or Second Life. If virtual worlds want to replicate the real world, then inhabitants must be able to move from one country to another.

One of the attractions of virtual worlds is that they enable you to meet not just friends, or friends of friends (as with Facebook, MySpace and Bebo) in a static way, but to meet people in a live environment whom you have come across randomly or because they share your interests.

This carries obvious dangers, not least of children straying into an adult environment, so Google is wise to take it slowly. But as a way of linking people, whether for political or artistic reasons, with others across the globe, virtual worlds have awesome possibilities.

This doesn't mean Google will win the race: the experience of the so-called Web 2.0 revolution is that small start-ups take the cream not the dinosaurs of the dotcom boom. For instance, Google had its own video site but couldn't use its massive leverage to achieve critical mass, so it had to buy YouTube instead. It remains to be seen whether it will be different with virtual worlds.

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