Google finally jumped on the Virtual World band wagon, by launching 3D virtual environment platform “Lively” on June 09, 2008. But before you started saying “Ah another Second Life” hold your horses, Google’s lively isn’t entirely a world, on the contrary it’s a virtual space/room, which you can embed to your own web page or blog or even on Facebook profile.

To run Google’s lively you should be running either Windows XP or Vista and your browser is IE or Firefox. The whole lively virtual space exists within your browser through a plugin provided by lively. The space and character visualization presents through Flash, so you will need to have flash plugin installed as well.

Unfortunately no matter how cool it sounds the virtual space take long time to load and the accessories for customizations is limited. And only windows user can enjoy the beta version, since no plugin for Mac OS or other operating system. Avatars don’t function quite right — for example, you can walk right through furniture. Avatars sitting down look miserable. Male character selection is horrible and limited. As i mentioned little room for customizations, once furniture is added to room-no way to remove that-Perhaps Google thought we will like one lousy couch for eternity.

Lively feels more like a Google Talk-powered chat room with 3-D camera controls than an impassive environment like Second Life. In part that’s a function of the small in-browser window that presents Lively’s various rooms — full screen graphics are inevitably more compelling.

Giving the credit to Google developer that they did created a virtual space that have lots of possibilities, but perhaps not yet-need major makeover and feature list to be added to lively, in order to get some juice out of it.