Lively
One million points to anyone reading this who made a virtual space in Google Lively (the points don’t matter, obviously). Considered a potential rival to Second Life (which remains popular to this day), Lively was a browser-based (IE and Firefox) digital 3D world where you could access information or chat with others by entering a room. Up to 20 people could be in a room at any point, where their avatars could communicate via cartoon-style bubbles.
The real appeal to Lively is that a room could be embedded onto a website much like a YouTube video. So a forum about soccer could consist of you entering a virtual soccer field to chat with jersey-wearing sports fans about the lame Champions League Final between Liverpool and Real Madrid. It just never caught on, and based on this scathing op-ed from Slate, we should all be glad.
The ironically named Google Lively survived a brief four months before being completely shut down. It never got out of beta and had only 10,000 active users when it was canceled.
