Google has announced that it will be closing Google Lively at the end of the year, four and a half months after the service launched.

The social networking space, set up in July this year, gave users the chance to interact while “expressing themselves online in new ways”. Google confessed that the experimental service hadn’t succeeded as planned: “We launched Lively because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways.

“Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation, but we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.

In a blog from the Lively Team, the reasons for the closure were spelled out: “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 prioritise 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.”