Lively could make it to be the fastest project Google has killed in its lifetime.
First introduced last July of this year, Google announced today that it will kill the project by December 31, 2008 — just before the clock hits 2009.
A message on the Lively.com site reports the demise with and explanation posted on the Official Google blog:
Lively will be shut down on December 31, 2008. After that time, you’ll no longer be able to enter Lively rooms and interact.
There will be no further releases of developer tools or additions to the current developer roster.
Please see our official blog post for more info on this decision.
The reason behind this is clear — Google is doing some belt tightening, not only on human resources but computing resources as well.