Welcome to Raph Koster's personal website: MMOs, gaming, writing, art, music, books.

Newlively!

January 5th, 2009

Newlively is a VRML-based clone of Lively, based out of China. And I mean clone, they claim one done in a month. Not yet feature complete to match the original, but apparently actually backed by a company with funding (though the website doesn’t say who).

Not surprisingly, looks like there’s Lively folks moving over already.

We are often emotionally moved by thoughts of past experiences and occasions. Likewise, if we could create a cyberspace environment and an Avarat where users are already familiar, we help lessen the impact of loneliness and disappointment. After the closure of Lively, there is no greater happiness than to duplicate Lively for the sake of the Lively users. We understand that this activity would generate a certain degree of legal risk. However, whenever I remember the disheartenment and disappointment of that many Lively users, this risk is worth taking and the users will support us. Google is a great company. Its greatness develops upon quality customer care. What we create is similar to Google Lively, which the users like. Based on this, there should be no problems. We want to prove it. Google Lively’s concept is great and good. Besides, we are not using any codes whatsoever from Google Lively. The entire platform was created new from scratch. Only the concept and the interface remained as Google Lively and the amount of work involved in doing this was quite insignificant in comparison to the creation of the entire system. Moreover, in our understanding of the kinds of platforms, copyright privileges should go to the content providers. As long as these content providers are willing to transfer the platform to Newlively, there will be no issues.

– from the FAQ

*

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Newlively!”

Jump to reader comments » | Leave a reply »

Trackbacks & Pingbacks
    Reader Comments
    1. cliff said on

      They need to solve user generated content sooner rather than later if they’re going to succeed, IMO.

    2. len said on

      If it’s VRML-based, it’s easy to get editors for that.

    3. len said on

      This is about to turn into a fascinating story and something of a splash of cold water on the Web 2.0 era virtual world industry. I’ve been digging around their site and faq.

      http://www.newlively.com/help/faq.jsp

      For those who still refuse to see the power of the IP-unencumbered standards in a marketplace, take a look at those World lawsuits, look at how short a time the Chinese team took to replicate Google’s effort using free technology, then ask yourselves if perhaps you’re generation is going to be the shortest lived dodos ever spawned on the web.

      This is a real market game changer.

    4. shawnyates said on

      This could be potentially huge yes, but Lively failed on many fronts and this clone could as well. Hopefully these guys changed the interface to make it a bit more intuitive.

    Page optimized by WP Minify WordPress Plugin

    Meta

    Recent Comments

    Categories

    Tags

    Recent Trackbacks

    Archives



    A Theory of Fun
    for Game Design

    Book cover for A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster

    Press
    Excerpts

    Buy from Amazon

    Twitter @raphkoster



    The whole Web

    Raph's Website

    See popular posts »



    After the Flood

    After the Flood CD Cover

    Available as MP3 download
    $14.99


    More stuff to buy

    Gator and Penguin Mousepad

    Gator and Penguin
    Mousepad

    $12.99


    LegendMUD

    click here to visit the Legend website

    "The world the way they thought it was..."