Google's Lively ... a missed opportunity?

A couple of days ago I started spotting the press-releases about Google's new virtual world offering called Lively.

I have to point out that this is a Beta and so we can expect some fairly major changes before the final version.

Lively, however, seems to fall somewhat short of the expectation put upon it by headlines like "Google's challenge to Second Life" which appeared on the BBC news website. Linden Labs really don't have much to fear from what is very much inline with my expectations of Virtual Worlds a few years ago and reminds me a lot of Adobe Atmosphere.

Coming from the company that brought us Google Earth, this seems miss-targeted and limited in it's conception. The concept of a 'virtual island on your webpage' is quite interesting as a nice extension to your website or blog, but the execution of it will I think type-cast it into a younger / teen market.

The other omission is the lack of any apparent developer or content creator support, or a roadmap for the plans associated with this. Given that Second Life has somewhat set the bar in this I would have expected Google to have attempted to address the developer community about what they can expect to get from Lively over the next year.

One final point is platforms. C'mon Google. Asus launch the EeePC and cannot make them fast enough to satisfy demand. Acer, HP and MSI (and possibly others) are all producing similar platforms. What do these all have in common? They all run on a Linux based OS (although a few do offer more expensive / less well spec'ed MS Windows versions). Launching a plugin like Lively and not thinking about a Linux version (the Lively site only mentions a Mac version in the future) seems to be cutting off a significant part of your target market. To make the example - I can easily run Linux Second Life on this EeePC 900. Lively? No.

So, Lively is on my things to watch list, but is something I hope will grow into something that I can use, because it falls short of my expectations at the moment.