Sony launched its long awaited (and delayed) Home 3D virtual world for the Playstation 3 this week and the service has already been plagued with issues.

The first day in there was widespread reports of people unable to log in to the service; according to Sony it was due to overwhelming popularity, although take the spin out and you’d have to say complete and utter inability to cater for an audience was the problem.

Three days later and Sony Home is going down the same path of just about every major 3D virtual space before it: sex. Second Life has always been famous for its sex, and Google’s Lively in its last days became only about the sex as those looking for their online virtual hit were the only people still using it. Now Sony Home has followed the path.

Like many other services, men have flocked to Home in greater numbers than women, and many are already using the service to trash talk, as the video below shows.

Whether Sony will crack down on this is yet to be seen, or more importantly if they’re able to at all given how “popular” it seems to be according to Sony’s press releases. The surprising thing I found from the video is that there isn’t more men playing female characters, as that seems to be the norm in other virtual spaces; after all, who needs women when you can pretend to be one

(via Alley Insider)

No surprise: Sony’s Home 3D world already turning to sex is a post from: The Inquisitr

Lively launched with a bang back in July with talk that it could become a Second Life killer. However limited support, poor uptake not helped by only being available to Windows users, and a general disinterest in the product has seen some speculating about its future for a while.

According to a post on the Google Blog, Google refers to Lively as a kind of experimentation, but says that “not every bet is going to pay off.”

That’s why, 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.

We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.

A new record for shortest lived Google product?

For those of you who can’t remember the service, which would be 99.99% of everyone reading this given how few people use Lively, here’s a demo video of what it looks like

Google to close 3D virtual space Lively is a post from: The Inquisitr

ExitReality transforms the social networking experience by offering virtual versions of every social network site profile, or any page on the web, on the fly and in real time. Users visiting a site or profile at the same time can interact, or simply browser the content within the space.

The 3D space created includes any rich media content on the site, and external sources can be dragged into a space, and all items can be copied. The platform is built on open standards including Collada, VRML and others, meaning that existing 3D objects built on the same standards can be easily included in any 3D space, including most objects from Google 3D/ SketchUp.

One of the coolest features is the offering of a “virtual space search engine” that allows anyone with their plugin to enter any 3D space on the web built on open standards, and when I lasted visited the company, there was over 3000 spaces with some incredible builds.

The business model revolves around the creation of custom spaces and advertising for site owners. The first announced deal was with Carls Jr, and since then Blinx has also come on board. Otherwise the service is free to use, and anyone can customize their space. Notably though this isn’t Second Life, and you don’t set up something external to your site; instead the space starts based on content on your site, and you go from there. The benefit there is that not only does every page online have a space (if you never use it, users who visit your site have one generated automatically), but site owners don’t lose traffic as the views within ExitReality a literally a 3D version of your site, calling your items, and counting towards your page views.

It’s a cool service, well implemented, but it does face some challenges, the biggest being Google. The first thing I thought when Google released Lively is that ExitReality is going to take a hit, but as it turns out, Lively is nearly a complete failure, so there’s still lots of room. ExitReality overcomes the boredom aspect of Lively by being a browsing experience, so finding fresh content is as easy as visit a new site. The other challenge is the reliance on a browser plugin, coupled with it being available for Windows. Asking users to install a plugin can be difficult, but what the service does would be a challenge any other way. In terms of Mac support, every time I’ve visited the company I’ve asked about it, and am always told soon. Hopefully one day

My two previous videos on ExitReality below, including an interview I did back in April for TechCrunch. And no, I didn’t pick the music on the second one

ExitReality launches: virtual spaces come to social networking is a post from: The Inquisitr