It's only a few months since Google announced Lively, an avatar-based system and one of those 20% projects from Google Labs. Well, it looked more like a knock-off of IMVU, and IMVU's boss Cary Rosenzweig said Google had tried to buy the company then hired away one of its co-founders. Whatever the background, Google Lively flopped, and The Official Google Blog now says Lively no more:

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. 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.

These are tough times and it's no surprise to see Google cutting a failed project. But it inevitably raises the question: What else could go? The awful Knol must be top of most people's lists. Google Video looks surplus to requirements. Orkut could perhaps do with a mercy killing. Google Sites? Google Base? Notebook? Does anybody actually use those?

We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, and then follow that up with the final release. Our next public release of IE (typically called a “release candidate”) indicates the end of the beta period. We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done. They should expect the final product to behave as this update does. We want them to test their sites and services with IE8, make any changes they feel are necessary for the best possible customer experience using IE8, and report any critical issues (e.g., issues impacting robustness, security, backwards compatibility, or completeness with respect to planned standards work). Our plan is to deliver the final product after listening for feedback about critical issues.

If you haven’t already – download Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 today and let the IE Team know what you think. You can also read my in-depth post on IE8 Beta 2 here.

You should also check out these 15 awesome IE8 demo videos as well to see some of IE8’s features in action such as the Favorites Bar, Web Slices, and Accelerators.