While the success of Facebook as a social networking platform has brought a lot of attention to its embedded game-like apps, and generated many parallels between advanced social networking behavior online and gaming, it's also made a lot of veteran fans of actual online games scratch their head a bit at calling, for example, vampire-biting your Facebook friends a "game."

The always-on-point Aleks Krotoski of the Guardian has an analysis of this phenomenon, and where Facebook games can begin to make a clear-cut entry into the virtual worlds space:

But back to Facebook. The social network site's commercial gaming apps aren't nearly as integrated as they could be. Most of them are the offshoot of game cultures, the ludic spray that fans bring to a different location than the game world. Today, the location of these playful activities happens to be Facebook. A few years ago it was an enormous library of self-published websites.

So what's out there that's attempted to be more than just another fan community? WowKon, a Facebook app that displays the latest World of Warcraft gaming news on your profile, is an example. Second Life Link app, which shows off your SL avatar to your Facebook mates. There are others, but as Raph explains, not very many people are using 'em. Sure, they support social interaction, but they do nothing to support the activities back in the game world. They are, simply, fan solutions. That's nowhere near as interesting as what was possible with the Dreamcast's interactive memory card (the dearly missed VMU).

Krotoski points out Activeworlds' recently-launched embeddable, the "3D Avatar and World Explorer" for Facebook (gotta give Activeworlds a nod of respect for not choosing a memetic, hip name for their tool and just calling it like it is, yes?). It uses ActiveX and forces the use of Internet Explorer, though, which might be somewhat of a restriction for some, but I think it's fair to say that, while social networking concepts and embeddable, Web 2.0-style Facebook games are definitely relevant to virtual worlds, this program is the first clear-cut marriage for Facebook with online worlds.

What is perhaps a bit more food for thought is this: why bring a virtual world to Facebook as a small embeddable? Why not do the reverse, incorporate more advanced social networking tools into online social spaces? That option would seem to offer the most flexibility for the best of both worlds.