Life, Not Lively

As part of Google's effort to "organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," the company has embarked upon a remarkable partnership with Time Inc., the owner of the Life magazine archives. Starting yesterday, Google has begun digitizing and posting the entire collection of Life photographs, some 10 million pictures dating back to the 1880s. Many of these photographs are being seen by the public for the first time.

This remarkable collection includes key works by Alfred Eisenstaedt, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Capa; you can even scour the Zapruder Kennedy assassination film for the second gunman, if that's your thing. Google has organized the archives by decade, and has posted about 20 percent of the archive, with the rest to be posted in the coming months.

On the other hand, Google can't do everything. Lively.com, the company's stab at duplicating Second Life's virtual world, is being shut down just four months after its launch date. The service, which allowed users to create their own virtual rooms where they could stream video and allowed users to communicate with one another, failed to do the one thing most businesses usually can't live without: pay for itself. Once upon a time, of course, Google wouldn't let a little thing like that bother it and would have let Lively chug along for a year or two, trying to monetize the site. But times being what they are, Google representatives sadly admitted in a blog post, "we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business." The site will wink out on Dec. 31.