Fun with Google and Lively

You know Cipher, sometimes I think you just might have been right. Why did I take the freaking Blue Pill? Day after day, it becomes more apparent to me that the Wachowski brothers really are the reincarnation of Nostradamus. We’re getting step-by-step closer to living in the Matrix, and everyone’s favorite search engine, Google, is helping to speed up insertion with its new service, Lively.

The beta, which released earlier this month, appears to be a simplistic Second Life clone. After downloading the application to Windows XP / Vista computer- sorry Mac users, no Lively for you- you select from one of ten initial avatars, three of which are animals. Once you have picked your avatar, you promptly clothe them with a small selection of apparel. Then it’s off to either a pre-rendered room, or a user-created one.

This is where the fun really begins… Now you get to decorate and / or invite your friends to chat with you. Wait for it: they can help you decorate, too. You move your avatar around the room via the mouse and he / she can perform simple actions, such as ‘laugh’ or ‘kick’. I know, by now you’re like, “I want to add Lively about as much as I want to climb up in a Ton-ton carcass.”

This is not to say that the service is completely worthless. You can watch YouTube videos on your virtual TV sets, put your own pictures up in your room, and add your room to your blog or your website. Plus, my personal favorite part of Lively: Porn! Yes, the Internet’s creator makes an appearance. Actually, it makes a lot of appearances, and this could be a problem for Google, considering anyone over the age of 13 can sign up for the service. But for over-21 perverts like me, hurray!

All in all, this is just a beta release and I’m sure the good people at Google are working diligently to improve the application. As social networking moves further into the 3D realm, avatars appear to be the wave of the future. What did they call those in the Matrix? Was it residual self-image or Miis?