Well that was pretty short lived wasn’t it? The search giant launched its answer to the hugely successful Second Life not six months ago but today announced via its corporate blog that it will be shutting down Lively.

The blog reads: “Despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, 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 prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.”

The plug will officially be pulled at the end of December. Lively, which is still being beta-tested, received an underwhelming response upon its launch in July and has since not been the runaway success Google may have hoped for, despite all its monetary and marketing muscle.

Google is encouraging current users to capture videos and screenshots of all their hard work before it is sucked up into the black singularity of the Internet.