Meet Lively, Google's Just Released Virtual World

Although these are free for now, Google appears to have plan to sell those since "price" fields are scattered all over the place.

Unlike Second Life though, Lively resides in your web browser rather than in a separate application and can be embedded in third party pages by merely copying and pasting some HTML code.

Although the project is in its infancy, users have already created more than 600 rooms, the visual equivalent of Chat rooms.

That said our experience on Lively was rather limited since we were stuck on "Joining Room" (see picture) except when we created our own.

And unlike Second Life, interaction remains rudimentary and crude; in one instance, moving your avatar to the left using your mouse actually caused it to go to the write.

Google though might have other ideas for Lively in the near future by combining it with say Orkut... Now that would be great.