Now this is rich. Google put on a media blitz this week for its new virtual world – Lively. I lasted about 10 minutes in it.

Leaving aside the fact that Lively’s visual aesthetic looks like it was lifted from Escape from Monkey Island, the program manages to do something I thought was impossible: it’s harder to use than Second Life. That hasn’t stopped some SLers from emigrating in hopes of a better virtual life. I doubt they will find it. The graphics suck, and, since Lively runs inside your browser (for some godawful reason), it naturally runs slower than hell.

Actually, that last reason is probably why Lively will survive in one incarnation or another. Google has designed the program so that users can embed Lively rooms into their web pages like YouTube videos. And Google spiders crawl the chat text, matching keywords to text ads and displaying them in the browser. This timesink has two things that Second Life doesn’t – a revenue stream and seamless interaction with the World Wide Web. Now, if they could just program some decent controls…