The talk of the web for the past 24 hours has been Google’s venture into yet another area of business with their surprising Labor Day announcement of Chrome – a browser to cater for 21st century web needs. Rethinking the client access point to gain better performance from their own services looks like a real smart move from Google.

To get the message across to a broader audience, Google has followed the Japanese corporate custom of publishing annual reports and other complicated documents as comic books. Before you download the actual browser you should calm your Chrome-cravings with these 38 illustrated pages.

The internal gears of a browser make for an almost exciting read when presented in this way and a wordy description here would be a waste of time in comparison. Let’s just say that Google Chrome promises to be both faster, simpler, more reliable and more secure. (Partly due to a Danish team of Google developers, who built V8, a virtual machine for running javascript more efficiently. (I obviously had to mention that, but you should now go read the comic book.))

As the Chrome news ticked into my RSS-reader I was looking into another of Google’s recent launches: Lively – an attempt at a virtual world concept that hasn’t really caught on yet during its two-month life span. But if Google plays its cards right – and they most likely will – perhaps Chrome could give the browser-based Lively an efficiency boost?

Contrary to virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or Second Life, Google Lively is a purely web based service, i.e. it runs its interactive 3D graphics through a browser plugin. This is quite demanding of your average configuration and there have been reports of severe loading time of the separately arranged chatrooms.

Despite other weaknesses such as poor controls, no first person view and a fixed set of creative templates, Google Lively is an interesting extension to the browsing experience. Rather than being a coherent virtual world in itself, Lively tries to add a third dimension to the fragmented World Wide Web. Anyone with a Lively account, the proper plugin and Windows (!?) can create a personal, virtual world on any HTML website (providing they have admin rights to that site of course.)

If Lively can muster enough members it could make for an alternate way of approaching ordinary website information. Adding customized 3D chat to potentially every website could make browsing a much more social experience than it has been so far.

Ok, so Lively isn’t rocket science and may be borrowing from pioneering virtual chats like thepalace.com or social browsing plugins like me.dium, but perhaps Google has the major-player leverage to pull this kind of thing off? With Chrome performance backing it up could the 3D web be a step further towards reality? With 3D spaces everywhere what are the advertising possibilities? And how does Android, Google’s mobile OS built on the same foundation as Chrome, play into all of this?

I’m already looking forward to the next issue of the Google Comics.

Google galore:
Follow the latest news at The Official Google Blog.
Danish Mozilla developer welcoming the initiative from Google.
The Economist: Google denies Lively flop.