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Lively allows users to create personalised avatars and virtual rooms. These rooms can be based around any theme, and filled with customised architecture and furniture, as well as elements from the web.

YouTube videos can be watched within a virtual PC, for example, and traditional emails sent and received.

Uniquely for a virtual world, these rooms can also be embedded into websites such as Facebook

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and personal blogs.

"The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web," says Niniane Wang, an engineering manager at Google who started to create Lively as a 20% project.

"We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web," he continues.

Unlike Second Life, however, these rooms are not connected as part of a virtual world, but are individually listed online.

Google requires that users are at least 13-years-old, and some of the content we saw when we tested it was adult in nature. Just one day after its launch there are several sex-orientated rooms, as well as more cerebal activites such as chess and music.

Lively is currently only available as a Windows download, although Google has said that a Mac OS version is a "high priority".