I came across a interesting post by Geoff Duncan titled "Second Life looks to Offer Enterprises Their Own Virtual Worlds". Fantastic, about time! Ever since I migrated over from ActiveWorlds to Second Life (very late in doing so) the first thing that struck me was that residents could not have their own virtual world. While this is not exactly the same thing, in Aw anyone could buy a world, this article talks about worlds for enterprises but I'm surprised it has taken so long for them to provide this service. Granted there are Islands and enterprises can freely place restrictions on their lands but I always found owning your own virtual world empowering and highly secure and I'm sure organisations will feel the same.

When Robert Frederick built the ActiveWorlds facebook application in 2007 I really thought the marriage of social networks and virtual worlds would start to come about, that perhaps facebook users would interact in each others with a mini -meaningful- virtual world or even virtual home attached to their profile. The said application has 208 monthly active users at present... I think that successful integration is a long time away.

I am hopeful that more enterprises will take on board their own virtual world, be it Second Life, Wonderland, ActiveWorlds etc for their own internal business. And I am hopeful that social networks and virtual worlds will integrate more and more, to what extent I am not sure but I think the next few years of development will be very interesting.

UPDATE: Check out rikomatic's blog post on SmallWorlds, a flash based virtual world which can easily be embedded on your social networking profiles such as Facebook or myspace. SmallWorlds "is a free online 3D virtual world where you can meet friends, play games, do missions, listen to music, watch videos and so much more. Decorate your apartment, buy clothes, or adopt a pet!"(Facebook application description) currently with 24,973 monthly active users!