3D chat rooms in comparison to Instant Messenger (msn)

This week required me to compare and contrast 3D chat environments and instant messenger programs. Having used windows messenger for some years now, I feel as though i have a fairly good grasp of it, however in regards to the 3D chat rooms, I have never experienced them. That was, not until the tutorial in which we were given a lesson to explore them. I tried three; Active Worlds, IM and Habbo Hotel. The first one, Active Worlds was much like a game interface where you could navigate a character around a 'world' and talk to anyone you liked. You could fly, swim underwater a run really fast. I didn't stay in it for long, but just the interface itself got me wondering. I thought that perhaps it could become an alternate universe for some people. A place where they could be cool if they wanted, change what they looked like, run super fast or do pretty much whatever they wanted. Obviously, it is a lot harder to do this in an instant messenger program like windows live because the people that you are talking to are generally your friends, not just 'some randoms' that you might have 'met' in a virtual reality. The second one that I used was IM, and it was much the same, from what i could gather, as windows live messenger, except that you could create a virtual avatar and do some other little things. The third, Habbo Hotel was i little different. I remember playing Pokemon once and the interface reminded me of that. The graphics weren't very good but it still had the essentials of having an avatar, which you could mold to who you wanted to be and you could talk to people by walking around a room and clicking on them.