Yesterday, Google launched its highly anticipated service called Lively, a virtual world platform which will enable users to create and personalize avatars and worlds, offering many more social interaction features than its GTalk service.

The new release will provide a complete integration with the Web, as it will offer users the possibility of creating their own rooms filled with their preferred videos and other content such as from Google’s photo service, also allowing them to embed the virtual rooms in other Web sites and blog pages.

The rooms will be able to host up to 20 people which will be able to chat with each other, with their texts appearing as cartoon-style bubbles.

"If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose," Niniane Wang, engineering manager, who oversaw Lively's creation, said on Google's official blog, referring to the numerous options featured by the service, options which provide sufficient ways of creating a place that users can consider their own and also a direct portray of their personality.

In order to fully experience the new service, users will have to download and install a special software and their computers will also have to be equipped with a video card offering at least 32 megabytes of video memory.

There is still room for developing the project, as many companies appeared interested in contributing one way or another in the process.

The first such online community appeared five years ago with Linden Lab's Second Life, which offered avatars, a growing economy and its own currency.