I was working at Google when lively was still just a one man 20% project. It didn't start in anticipation of anything, it was just a guy having fun and he event

I was working at Google when lively was still just a one man 20% project. It didn't start in anticipation of anything, it was just a guy having fun and he eventually got enough momentum internally to garner official interest in it. The one thing I remember though is that there seemed to be a big internal debate about the whole concept being cheesy and out of scope for Google. Generally though google will embrace just about anything internally. As for the ad deal, I'd have loved to seen it go through but don't have anything really insightful to add.