Google launched a new virtual world competitor for Second Life and other similar communities this week, with Lively. Lively is a virtual community where users can create animated avatars and design their own spaces, interact with other uses, and chat.

According to TechCrunch, Lively differs from Second Life in that there is no one main "world" for all the avatars to gather in. Furthermore, while the Lively "worlds" can be embedded into web pages (such as social networking sites), this feature is currently only available for Windows users.