Google's Lively already home to sleaze

I've been playing around a little bit with the new offering from Google - Lively. It's already been compared to Second Life, and I can see how that comparison works, in that you can create your own rooms, make your own avatar, dress them and so on. (Think Barbie dress-up and you're not far wrong). I've not spent enough time with it yet to see how the dynamics work though, so I'll wait a while before commenting. However, I can already see that there are going to be advantages over Second Life. For example - I can actually put things into a room without needing to have any idea of what I'm doing. In Second Life unless you were going to buy something off the shelf you would need to create it, and my programming skills, non-existent as they are, meant it just wasn't going to happen. I don't need to interact with the 'community' from what I can see, so I can just invite people into my room for a chat or discussion. Lively is doing what Second Life should have done, which is create little 'bolt on' elements, without requiring the whole kit.

However, it was a shame to see that when I logged onto the Lively site this morning (unusually for Google you have to download an application first onto the computer, rather than having everything driven by the browser) 2 of the first three rooms that I saw had, or at least implied, 'adult content'. (As you can see from the screen grab). Now, I have absolutely no problem with adult content in the slightest, but I do think it's unfortunate that it's not rather more locked away. Flickr does this very well, and I would have expected Google to have put something into place already, prior to launch. Let's hope that they'll do so soon.

Other than that, it looks interesting. When I have a room that I'm happy with I'll invite you to take a peek around it!