Back in July, Google released its 3D interactive chat environment called Lively, looking to "help people experience another dimension of the Web." The service features real-time virtual world characters known as avatars that can be found in a three-dimensional graphics environment where they congregate in virtual rooms.

Unfortunately, the project never really managed to take off as a social destination and the low interest shown by Internet users led to the company’s decision to terminate the service.

Google’s official blog presents the team’s explanation, where its members say that they accept the fact that not all projects can work out as planned, and "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," the blog post notes. "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."

The team also explains that this type of experimentation has always been appreciated, because it is considered the best way to develop groundbreaking products that can actually make a difference in people’s lives. The final message, sent to all of the service’s users, is an encouragement to capture their hard work by saving videos and screenshots of each one of their rooms. After December 31, 2008, embedded rooms in blogs and other Web pages will still show an image, but users will no longer be able to enter Lively rooms and interact.

This is not Google’s first failed effort, as the list includes several others: Google Answers, which was a fee-based question and answer service, Google Video, which was designed to allow users to search the transcripts of television shows, Google Browser Sync, a Firefox synchronization extension, and also Google Compute, a distributed computing Google Toolbar plug-in. The announcement has already started rumors about the termination of other Google community projects, such as Orkut, Jaiku and Knol which did not attract many investments until now.

Lively’s designers are expected to be redistributed over the months to come to other Google projects.

The move came as a surprise for some, while others were expecting the move. In these hard times, every company has to take a close look at its activities, decide what works and what doesn’t and cut its losses short, in order to use all of its employees and resources on the activities that bring in the biggest revenue. In Google’s case, just as the post said, the focus must be set on its core search, ads, and apps businesses.

Google is always looking for the next big thing and once the crisis ends, the company will surely attempt to begin new interesting and innovative projects.