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And of course, the web is already overflowing with head lines saying "The Second Life Killer is finally here!" Hmmm... While you ALWAYS have to take Google's project seriously ... is hard to see a Second Life "Killer" here.

Lively reminds me of IMVU, Vivaty and the early Kaneva. It is not a virtual "world" but a network of loosely connected scenes. This is a quite popular model for many platforms calling themselves "virtual worlds", which appeared on the market in the last 3 years. I am uncertain, if this model will be too successful in the long run.

This does not mean, that this could not reach a huge target audience. But the competition is already there. And some of the products already on the market do not look too bad. Vivaty, which has a very similar approach (as far as one can judge it now), has the big advantage of being tightly integrated with Facebook and AIM.

I started uploading my photos into Picasa because it’s run by Google, just like Blogger is. And now I think I’m stuck. I certainly don’t want to move everything I’ve got in Picasa over to Flickr, and I don’t want to just start putting the new stuff on Flickr because the idea of scattering my photos across two hosting sites just bothers me.

There are too many people to follow, and it just got sort of overwhelming. I had a hard time following conversations between people, and before long I was spending huge chunks of my workday just trying to catch up on friends’ Tweets. On top of all that, I also had a hard time coming up with things to say in my own Tweets. Frankly, I can’t imagine why anyone would find the daily minutiae of my life to be worth reading, and the 140-character limit on each Tweet seemed to prevent discussion of anything more deep.

All of a sudden, it seemed like everyone moved over to Plurk. This was about the time I took my little summer vaca from SL, and so I haven’t even given a serious look to Plurk, but my superficial examination has left me thoroughly confused. I guess it’s like Twitter on steroids, with all the pressure to microblog and keep up with other folks’ microblogs, but with the added pressure of a reputation rating called “karma”! No thanks.

The launch of Picnik a couple of days ago brought us yet another online photo editing tool. Like Fauxto, Picnik uses Flash, whereas most of the earlier editing tools all use Ajax for in-browser editing. Since all computers come with basic software that rotates, resizes and crops photos, there needs to be a compelling reason to use an online service. Uploading a photo to such a service, editing it and then downloading it back to your hard drive too high of a cost. To compensate for this, most services allow you to transfer the edited photos directly to Flickr, Webshots or other online photo services, saving users the trouble of making round trips uploading and downloading. Most of these online services also offer editing tools that go beyond simple rotation, resizing and cropping and start to creep into Photoshop territory. Here’s a few of the better ones, along with our most recent testing notes: