Google Kills Lively

Nov 20, 2008 at 9:20am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Blog announced they will be discontinuing Lively, Google’s Virtual World project. In short, they said that Lively is simply “not going to pay off” and that they will be closing it down by the end of December.

It is interesting that this happened just days after I reported that Google will be changing how they develop products. Is this one of the first projects to be axed by Google’s Stuart Smith? Possibly. But this is not the first product to fail from Google.

In any event, Google made it sound like no one at Google will be losing their jobs over the Lively massacre. Google specifically said, “everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.”

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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