November brought bad news for all Livelyzens. In a brief blog post, Google officially announced that they would shut down Lively.com in order to "prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business"

Lively was one of many services that came from the Google Labs environment. The service was released in July 2008 and introduced an innovative, 3-D social platform, where users could build their own interactive rooms and embed them into web pages. But only 4 months later Lively was discontinued, leaving the active user community in a sad state.

As a response to the sudden lock-down, the community has created an online petition, which many have signed, adding comments like "Lively has given me so much - please don't shut it down" and "Lively is more than a chat in 3D. [...] it is a world of feelings." All a little sad really, in so many ways...

Yet while the shut-down is indeed sad for the many users, it is also a timely reminder that

1. You need to be careful with any beta release.
2. Vendors -- including big vendors more often than not -- sometimes discontinue offerings

The case with Lively illustrates that Google is a business just like any other and that businesses need to make money. As they themselves write on their blog: "[...] we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off. That's why [...] we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year."

In a future Google in the Enterprise Report, we will take a close look at Google based on our many on-going conversations with customers about their experiences. Thanks go to my colleague Peter Sejersen for his eagled eyed analysis of the Lively situation. And If you would like to contribute and share your thoughts, we would both still like to hear from you. Please contact us directly at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you!