Comments on: Lively, another Google fail

By: BC

BC — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:59:03 +0000

Do Google do much marketing at all?

There may be some product placement, but that may just because it is so dominant and the term ‘googling’ is so heavily used.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:12:34 +0000

Jimbob,
Your comment is very interesting and makes good sense. However this is not the message that Google are getting out to the world. So they are suffering from a massive marketing department fail.

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:42:42 +0000

I don’t think you’ve understood Lively at all mate.

The big diff with it is that it lets you set up your own virtual worlds associated with your own site. A bit like what they’re doing with OpenSocial. Or Knol (ish). Or Sites. Or their web app-hosting framework.

Google’s take on social networking is simple: They realise that there’s no need for Facebook and Myspace and Second Life and what amount to basically AOL 2.0. The internet is already a social network itself, distributed out. So Google are building lots of distributed tools that let people get on with building their own ads and building businesses.

I think that’s very long-term but also incredibly smart, and they’ll win it in the end.