A little more Lively?

You may have seen my previous (and somewhat disappointed) post about Google's new web-based virtual world, Lively.

I was bemoaning the lack of an apparent strategy or any solid information about the future of Lively or the kind of service into which it may grow.

Not being one to give up on new technologies straight away, I emailed Google about becoming one of the content developers for Lively and tagged a couple of additional questions on to the end of the email.

The reply that I received from Danny on the Lively team at Google did provide a little more detail (I'm omitting Danny's surname so that he doesn't get a surge of emails from people guessing his email address).

On the subject of content development for Lively Danny replied "Content creation for Lively is in closed beta right now, but I put your name on the list of future developers. We are planning to release the artist tools soon and we'll let you know when we do."

Now this is promising. Comprehensive content development tools for Lively would make it much more interesting as a virtual worlds tool.

I also asked about plans for a Linux version of the Lively client. Danny responded with "We're trying to bring Lively to as many different operating systems and browsers as we can, but I don't have any details on when they'll be available."

That sounds even more interesting. Following a less-than-harmonious experience with my previous laptop, I'm very happy with my EeePC 900. This of course is running Linux (OpenSUSE 11 to be exact) and I'd much prefer to be using Lively on this, rather than resorting to a PC.

I hope that this information is the start of more detail being provided by Google about lively and it's place in their online strategy. I hope to continue my dialogue with Danny and will let you know any information as I get it.