I remember doing a post on Lively a few months back here, and was surprised to find out that Google was actually shutting it down!The rational behind it was that Google didn’t learn anything useful from the data. Basically, Lively is similar to second life and when i was checking it out it was still in Beta version.
Coming across this article today, twenty 9th graders from Georgia take on Google, I was even more surprised to find out that there was a community which was going to protest the closing of Lively. There’s an actual community which is pretty much ‘lively’ (hur hur) there!
While i’m not much of a fan of Lively, i would like to see how Google responds to this. Google has always been at the forefront of innovation and using it to fulfill everyone’s needs online. With a current protest ongoing, will they simply ignore the current Lively community and go ahead with the closure or will they do something about it?
If they do decide to go down the road of ignoring this community, I wouldn’t be surprised if the media, anti-Google fans or competitors start accusing them of not caring about the Lively community. Accusing them of taking away a service which actually still provide a benefit to a group of people, and I’m sure they can monetize it and earn some kind of profit.
Have there been other incidents where Google shut down services which people still wanted? Do share!
Hello Oldskoolmark,
My name is dreamer2032, and I am one of the 20 ninth graders who are protesting Lively’s shutdown. I participated in a protest that we held in Lively on December 10 to try to get more supporters of our cause.
You are probable wondering why we are doing this. The truth is, we used Lively to teach the seventh graders at our school about digital citizenship. Lively was so helpful because it allowed us to teach in a safe environment and let the seventh graders have fun while learning as well.
After finding out about Lively’s shutdown, we teamed up with the Livelyzens, a group of Lively supporters, and began thinking of ways that we could convince Google to keep Lively. We formed a blog, made a protest room in Lively, and even made a song telling why Google should keep Lively.
I would like to thank you for writing about us. Everytime that someone writes about us, we get more and more attention to Google about why they should keep Lively. If you would, would you please sign a petition to keep Lively alive. You can visit this website at http://www.petitiononline.com/golively/petition.html to sign the petition. Thank you so much for helping our cause.
Sincerely,
dreamer2032