I'd like to start by saying that I hope everyone, who celebrates it, had a great Christmas.

Throughout this semester, I've been writing about different types of communities that are available. These include geographic communities, comminities of practice, communities of interest, communities that support certain faiths and so on...
Along with these, I have also discussed anonymity, authority and the issues that surround them.

To clarify some terms about social communities, we first look at social networks.
A Social network is a network of any sort of relationships between people, whether this being a forum about vw beetles or a university discussion board.

Social software is software that supports online networks. This software is used for many applications such as instant messaging, internet forums, virtual worlds such as online gaming etc.

The question of whether social-networking sites are the future of the internet or just a passing fad is an interesting argument as hundreds of thousands of people are involved in social networking, although there have been many problems such as the story of people spending the majority of their time gaming and interacting online instead of actual human interaction.
It is argued that online interaction can cause people, who spend too much time interacting online, to become relcuse from the real world which includes human interaction.
In my opinion, it is up to the user to decide the amount of time that is appropriate to spend online, but it appears that some people don't know when to stop. I agree that this could very well be a problem.

Until next time.