Lively.com will be shut down in December, Google has announced.

The Lively project, which let you make your own virtual chatrooms to interact with online friends, was begun in July this year.

You could create avatars that 'talked' to each other in your own custom-made environment, which was an attempt to harness the ever-growing phenomenon of social networking.

Yet after barely five months, the company has decided to pull the plug on Google Lively, describing it as a "tough decision".

"Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it's the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people's lives," the Lively Team wrote on the Google blog.

"But we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off," the post continued.

www.lively.com
www.google.co.uk

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