On Tuesday, Google launched the beta version of its online tool called Lively. The application can be used for creating personalized 3D social spaces on various websites.

According to Niniane Wang, Engineering Manager at Google, Lively enables users to put together their very own characters (avatars) and to create rooms, that can later on be embedded with their websites or blogs. But wait, there’s more: once users create the rooms, they can integrate them with MySpace or Facebook webpages; YouTube video support is also featured in the tool.

For using Lively, users must, most importantly, be older than 13; from here on out it gets easy, as only a computer running Windows and an Internet Explorer or a Firefox browser are needed.

It seems Google is going deeper and deeper into the online social environment. The company announced its OpenSocial project back in October, as a response to the multitude of already existing networks and future strategies presented by independent social network-oriented companies. OpenSocial is desired to be an alternative to the presently extremely fragmented online scenery and is trying to connect all the relevant entities.

Major online presences such as Linkedln, Hi5, Bebo and Plaxo, as well as several smaller networks have also agreed to be part of the project. Rival companies Google and Yahoo, along with the very popular social networking website MySpace, joined forces at the end of March, in a move that will add the needed support to the OpenSocial project.