Last night, Friday, August 1 at 5 PM PST (SLT)/8 PM EST, I attended an event hosted by World2Worlds (check http://www.world2worlds.com).

The event was a cross world conversation about Lively.com. Initially, I attended in Second Life and then I joined the event in Lively.com and listened to the conversation in a realtime Web feed.

This event was billed as "an informal conversation with software architects Mark Young and Greg Spencer, key contributors to Google's new Lively virtual world."

I have been curious about how Lively.com works, so I attended. What did I discover?

1) There were about 20 avatars at the Second Life meeting place and I had lots of lagg. I had to watch the event held in Lively.com in my web browser because for some reason I was not getting a video stream or sound.

2) Logging into Lively was easy this visit and I quickly found the World2Worlds meeting room. I had some trouble navigating, but the room was nicely laid out and better for a meeting that the World2Worlds room in Second Life.

3) I am familiar with using the arrow keys to navigate my avatar, change the camera, etc in Second Life. That doesn't work in Lively.com. Eventually during the discussion with Mark and Greg I figured out dragging my avatar with the mouse. Motion of an avatar in Lively.com is more drag and drop. So the 3D interface is more 2D in Lively.com.

4) I hate the chat bubbles in Lively.com. Also, listening to the sound on another web page was annoying. The questions and responses were very informative and voice is so much better than chat for conversation.

5) I like Lively.com much better now than the first few times I tried it. In general, it may be a much better environment for business meetings than Second Life. Why? Infrequent users should have a shorter learning curve. The environment is more controlled and more restrictive.

6) Because Lively.com is tightly integrated with a web browser, the developers should be able to integrate other web capabilities.

7) Unless Lively.com expands its capabilities it will not be a serious player in the virtual world space.

8) At the end of the session I went to the Google meeting room in Lively.com and changed my avatar name to Dan Power. Sadly the lagg was horrible and I eventually crashed to get out of Lively.com.

So the bottomline! Lively.com should be watched and investigated as a viable virtual world platform.

PS: I need to read the Lively.com Help manual, http://www.lively.com/help/ .

PPS: Thanks to Kimberly F. Smith, CEO of World2Worlds (check http://www.world2worlds.com).

Technorati Tags: Lively.com, Business Intelligence, Decision Support