Google has released today Lively, their own 3d virtual world. I’ve been test driving it and those are my early thoughts:

• It’s a browser plugin which is good – installing a stand-alone software seems more complex to end users and look too much like a game when web3d is clearly *not* a game – this has been one of the major cause of disappointment about SL
• It takes forever to load a room… about 10 mins to have the room completely loaded on a pretty fast DSL2+ line
• No user generated content : Major drawback, you’ve got to think to the content catalog. Google says they hope to bring UGC some time but imho without a decent UGC creator studio (which is on of SL’s greatest achievements) this is going to be just yet another fisher-price web3d experiment
• HMI is really simple, probably too simple, motions seem weird (left goes right ? ) and use of the mouse unnatural. Although I have a MacbokPro with a GeForce, FPS seemed pretty slow.
• Integration with gtalk is clearly a good way to go – that’s exactly what i wanted to show with the SL-Messenger project, virtual world and online communities should be bound together using the usual communication channels.

Overall it’s interesting to see Google go in that area – there is still a lot to do though to turn this test into something useful …