After a month watching anxiously the statistics at Google Lively's own site, I'm everything but impressed. It attracted 50,000 rooms (they're so easy to create... and abandon) in a day or two. After 2 more days, they grey to 90,000. Now they're 135,000 after a month. That shows obviously an exponential growth, surely, but not an overall impressive one. The number of new rooms now grows at a thousand or so per day.

But as said, rooms are easy to create and abandon. Visitors are also tracked down by Lively, and here we'll see much less impressive statistics. The most "famous" room is Google's own: it attracted 22,000 or so non-unique visitors (i.e. the same person is counted twice if they visit the room twice, even in the same day) after a day, and 52,000 after a month. That's nothing. You can equate non-unique visitors with a webserver's "page views" (a meaningless statistic for marketeers, but an important one for system administrators, since it shows the load a webserver is under) — and in that case, a humble blog like mine gets that amount in a week or so, with 400 unique visitors every day. This is everything but "impressive growth".

Granted, Google is hardly promoting Lively. It just seems an afterthought these days. I was personally expecting a lot of more enthusiasm around Lively.

So I wonder if Linden Lab is really that worried about Lively. It might just be Mark Kingdon shifting the focus of Second Life: he read the signs on the VW '08 conference — everybody was going for 3D Flash games for kids — and he wants to make it quite clear that Linden Lab is not in that business and doesn't believe in it (neither do I): they wish to go corporate and side with their partners IBM (and possibly Microsoft) to offer a completely different environment and target a totally different market than the one Lively wishes to compete.

Sure, it's good to be watching closely what the competition is doing. Twinity, for instance, recently released a survey where they asked their clients what kinds of features they would like to see on their virtual world. They did the homework well: all the major features are taken from Second Life, namely, more avatar personalisation (clothes, animations); land sales, land rentals; and uploading user-created objects. All things that Google has no intention to have. So I think that everybody's strategy is either trying to enter the "kid market" (hopefully with a product that is better than Google's Lively...) or instead follow the leader in the "serious" social environment for adults and compete with Second Life. I'd say that Linden Lab is not "fearing" the giant Google, but making sure they grab the corporate market before Kaneva, Twinity, Vivaty, or any other start-up catches up with them in that much more interesting market...

But, alas, Linden Lab might have some secret information on what Google plans to do next...