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As GigaOm reports, it’s more akin to the 800 lb gorilla in the room giving a wave and saying “Yeah, I’m here.” Only it turns out that it’s wearing a tutu and has blue hair.

Instead, Google gives us. Hmmm. Well, it’s kind of like IMVU. Or Kaneva. And certainly a lot like Vivaty, whose integration into Facebook makes it the current, um, 3D Facebook:

Why Be Lively? So what gives? So far, there’s nothing NEW here, nothing that wasn’t done on a 100 other platforms. So why do it at all?

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:

Males and females are distributed unequally across the age categories, as shown in Figure 1 (for the earlier sample) and Figure 2 (for the later sample). That is, there are more female than male “teens,” and more male than female “adults.” Participation by gender is equal only in the “emerging adult” category in the later sample.

Age was coded into two categories for the earlier sample (adult and teen, operationalized as less than 20 years of age). For the later sample, we added an “emerging adult” category for authors between the ages of 20 and 25 (cf. Arnett, 2000), based on our impression after coding the first sample that many “adult” blog authors were in their early 20's