Google's "Lively" Virtual World is Dead

Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.

We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.

I never did get around to sampling Lively, since the initial reviews I read suggested it was pretty lame. I’m very cautious about putting hard work into creating content in a proprietary format that I can’t export (ahem). 

I recently downloaded Sketchup 7, which is the latest version of Google’s 3D design tool, but the free version still doesn’t have an easy way to export your models to other formats.  So I’ll probably delete Sketchup from my hard drive (after I’ve made screen shots of the models I’ve created, so that later I can re-create them in Blender3D, which offers an insane number of import and export options).