I never tried Metaplace but it reminded me of The Palace which I did spent many hours of my youth on. It would be interesting to see if these 2d chats have work-place benefits over the current Slack/IRC experiences.
Yeah, I remember that one as well. Real fun. Its also why I never bothered with Second Life ("been there, done that"). I just checked and saw someone even made a Linux client for The Palace. Neat!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)