This is cool news — Activeworlds has a Facebook app now.

They’re best known for AlphaWorld, of course, but ActiveWorlds hasn’t been inactive since then. They switched over to a browser plugin model for their client a very long time ago. I’ve often commented that Second Life is clearly a descendant of AlphaWorld, even if SL doesn’t actually draw direct inspiration from it. For example, in ActiveWorlds you build by cloning objects — not exactly prims, but similar. One cute difference is that you claim land in ActiveWorlds by laying objects on it. As in, completely covering it up. 🙂

There’s a sizable library of stuff made for ActiveWorlds already… and you can run your own servers. But it’s certainly orders of magnitude more complex than what a Facebook user typically encounters. It’ll be interesting to see what the adoption is like given that the most popular “virtual space” app on Facebook is this.

(I also note that “open standards” is the latest buzzword — it gets mentioned in this press release, and it’s not exactly relevant).