Lively?

I just tried out Lively, Google's answer to Second Life.

It's a virtual world that uses your browser as the client software. You can read more about it here on Google's blog.

If you need to hug when you go to blogs, this might be the technology for you. I'm not sure I need the social web quite that much up in my grill, but I've read Stephenson's "Snow Crash", so I understand this might be a step in a potentially fruitful direction.

Still, why Google? For a long time I've resisted the urge to call Google evil just because they have all my data and know everything I've ever done online. Creepy. Now I wonder if they're becoming evil by mistake.

In a world where business plans end with "Step 3: Sell to Google/MS/Yahoo", I think we have to start worrying about how monopolizing audience and/or coding talent limits the creativity of the web.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but we're seeing this disturbing trend of a few major players buying up or co-opting the entire web. So Google, just because you can compete with SecondLife doesn't mean you have to. You're a search engine, remember? How long before they start selling books?

On the other hand, Lively is a pain to use so far. Maybe this is a flash in the pan.

Meanwhile, here's a view of Google through Lively (or not, I don't know. I'm just embedding a Lively room because I can.):