Jul 09 2008
Google Introduces new way of interactive chat!
The very plain textual chat on Google is now going to be a fun by embodying a cartoon style online avatar and have text-based conversations with friends and other Internet users in virtual chat rooms. The company announced this new online tool on Tuesday.
Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog and can be reached at www.lively.com which is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company’s site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase.
‘Lively’ will make the conversation more interactive and fun. You can create your own Chat rooms. These chat rooms can be added to any blog or Web site and are two-dimensional — they include text, and sometimes voice and video. Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another.
Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google’s photo service, as if they were pieces of art.
The new product was headed by Niniane Wang, an engineering manager. Students at the University of Arizona have been testing ‘Lively’ for several months.
Ms. Wang wrote in the blog post that she developed ‘Lively’ as a “20 percent project,” referring to Google’s philosophy that employees should spend one day a week working on projects outside of their day-to-day responsibilities.
