It was discontinued and permanently shut down on December 31, 2008.

Lively was only supported on Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, using Windows XP or Windows Vista.

The program was designed to be integrated with the Web and provided a new way to access information.

This was enabled through the embedding of Lively "rooms" into any HTML webpage—which meant content could be provided in a two-dimensional format, and communication surrounding the topic of that content could be made in the three-dimensional room without the need to enter a separate program.

[1] Engineering manager Niniane Wang supervised this Google project, described in The New York Times by Brad Stone: Google eventually introduced this product on July 8, 2008, with this comment by Wang: Gadgets in Lively rooms could also run on a user's desktop through Google Desktop.