What's The Deal With Google Lively?

On Tuesday, Google launched its Second Life competitor, a virtual world known as Google Lively. It touts itself as a virtual world that, unlike Second Life, complements your actual life. How this magical complement is supposed to happen isn't clear to me at the moment, only that Google seems to think that by integrating Lively with IE and Firefox, they're adding a great... virtual world... experience... to your... browser? The end result seems more like a chat room that combines some static graphical flourishes and all the fun of standing in a room with strangers while everyone's facing in different directions. With one guy who can't stop break dancing. True, installing the minimal client took about five seconds and then I was living large with Lively - and given my choice of hairstyles (that looked as if they'd been yanked... [read full story]