This evening, we spent an hour with Mark Young and Greg Spencer, two of the chief architects of Google Lively, talking about Lively tech, UI, and Google's plans for opening the service to user-generated content. In addition to our lively crew in Lively itself, a simfull of our friends joined from SL, and a passel of folks linked up via the web to watch the streamed video.

This mixed-virtual-realities-plus-web-community stuff is beginning to feel natural. Which makes me think that -- once again -- virtual worlds are trying to teach me something through experience that I might, from a distance, have dismissed. I'm a big fan of immersion, and what you might call "verisimilitude": and I think that powerful psychological dynamics are recruited when virtual environments model reality more or less closely, or at least strive for richness, detail, and "self-containedness." So while I've been, out of necessity, a big proponent of using media and Web 2.0 contrivances (e.g., AJAX-based chat) to break down the walls between worlds, I've always viewed this as a stopgap -- thinking that, when VWs really hit massive scales and become interoperable, we won't need special tech to spread experience. What I think I'm learning, however, is that immersion tolerates mixed reality very well -- probably because, as 21st century humans, we already have huge experience with technology paradigms that have similar characteristics. Nobody thinks twice about holding a conversation with people in the room, while also watching a TV show (many TV shows -- the Olympics, presidential debates, etc., would be far less fun without such local social interaction). Mixed-virtual-realities isn't that different.

The Google Lively team, meanwhile, is going through a crash, post-launch course in the real nature of social virtual reality (in contrast to hypotheticals), and it's fascinating to hear their experiences, what they're learning, and how fast they're adapting. You sorta have to figure that folks who work for Google, and who could execute a project like this in under two years, working one day a week, are pretty much "the smartest people in the room." But being smart doesn't guarantee success when you're dealing with social variables (cranky users, preconceived market notions, demanding developer-partners, scoffing pundits, and perhaps even some corporate stakeholders who don't quite get it). What's most impressive about the Lively folks we've met is that they're listening closely, watching, debating, and that they're emotionally prepared, one gets the impression, both to toss out stuff if they decide it isn't working, and to stick by their guns if they believe it's the right thing to do. And they're winning some real victories on both sides. On the 'toss out stuff that doesn't work' side, for example, they're looking seriously at the permissions structure controlling animations, with an eye to giving avatars more control of what gets done to them by others. On the stick-by-your-guns side, Mark Young and I did a brief conversational fugue about the chat-balloons in Lively -- a UI trope I initially hated, but that I'm coming to realize actually reveals a great deal of social information in a way that linear, pure-text scrolling chat does not.

It was a fun hour. Here's the raw footage+audio in case you missed it. Have patience at the beginning, as we wade through sound-checks (ustream doesn't let you edit).