I started tinkering with Google Lively today. If you’re not familiar with Lively (www.lively.com) it’s Google virtual world software that currently runs on Windows.

Lively allows you to create your own virtual worlds, customize avatars, and then embed them in web pages. What’s so interesting about this concept is that you could effectively use these virtual worlds (or glorified chat rooms depending on how you look at them) to interconnect online communities that span multiple websites.

I have embedded a room below for you to tinker with that has quite a few people in it so it should be easy to test out the user experience. I found it to be a bit clunky, but I also appreciate the fact that it’s running in a browser and is a Gen 1 product.