Why Lively is the New Gmail

Three reasons why I don’t think Lively will kill Second Life:

1. No Mac client! (As TD noted) But it seems to be typical for Google to develop apps for Windows systems first and then, oh, somewhere down the road, when nobody’s doing anything over their lunch hour, to come up with a Mac version. That was the deal with Gmail, which also was touted as the big Yahoo/Hotmail/AOL killer. Some years later, the Mac version skittered down the tube. Today, Gmail is a good email client — many users consider it essential — but it neither killed the other big Web email clients, nor did it bankrupt all the email marketers whose messages have to compete with the Adwords ads served next to them in the client.

2. I put no faith in a virtual world that makes my avie look like a damn Bratz doll. Or one of those annoying Zwinky avatars. It’s bad enough that my gurl took a lot of shaping so she *didn’t* look like Lara Croft Tomb Raider.

3. Anyone who thinks Second Life is just about cartoon characters chatting with each other hasn’t spent enough time in it to truly understand it. The creativity, ingenuity and brilliance I witness every day is a hard act to follow.

I suppose I could get into gear and boot up the Windows side of my MacBook to check it out (and even then I don’t have any assurance that Lively would run correctly), but the app as I viewed it on the YouTube promo just isn’t compelling enough to get me to do it.

Guess I’ll just stick to my skybox for now.