Google is to shut its 3D virtual world Google Lively less than 6 months after launching it.

Lively launched with a bang back in July with talk that it could become a Second Life killer. However limited support, poor uptake not helped by only being available to Windows users, and a general disinterest in the product has seen some speculating about its future for a while.

According to a post on the Google Blog, Google refers to Lively as a kind of experimentation, but says that “not every bet is going to pay off.”

That’s why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. 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.

A new record for shortest lived Google product?

For those of you who can’t remember the service, which would be 99.99% of everyone reading this given how few people use Lively, here’s a demo video of what it looks like

Lively