We utilize Second Life as a business communication tool and unfortunately Lively is very cartoonish and clunky and not conducive to business applications. I had much higher expectations from Google. I do however understand that Lively takes less bandwidth and therefore is a better product for older PCs and Macs and lower internet speeds. We have found that Second Life has definite value from training and education perspective and I just don’t see this from Lively (so far). Maybe they are not concerned with business applications and only social networking. In SL we have been conducting training in the form of sales simulations and virtual classrooms for several months with good success. Companies like Sun Microsystems, Cisco, IBM and others are using the medium on a regular basis to conduct employee orientations and other functions in an efficient manner. With the price of fuel and travel costs more companies are utilizing this space as an alternative to in-person meetings and it is much more engaging then a WebEx or conference call. We are meeting with a company in India later this year to discuss SL applications for virtual team communication. I guess with Lively we will have to wait and see.