Niniane Wang an Engineering Manager at Google announced on the Official Google Blog yesterday the release of lively.com, a 3 dimensional social web project that was undertaken through Google's 20% program that encourages employees to spend 20% of their working time developing ideas. Here is a quote from the blog post "If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text “[[hug]]”." It seems a little like an embedded 2nd life, I've not yet downloaded the client but intend to play around with it, you just might see a greatbiggeek room popping up soon. I'll let you know...
