Online Communities

1822 Words4 Pages

Online Communities.

To start off my essay I would like to stress on the fact that an online community is not created online communities evolve and flourish. Most of the well built online communities take time and effort to establish them. In this essay I will be covering topics like how people interact in an online community, also will be looking at how to facilitate a successful online discussion and how to evaluate the success or failure of an online community.

With the dawn of the new century and advances in computing, companies and organisations realised the importance of getting a target market of potential customers and employee's which is based online and thus providing a faster and easier way for mass communication and discussions. Then came a revolution of many other online communities I quote a famous FOX News presenter "Some of the better known social computing initiatives include blogging; Wikipedia; flickr; social networks like Orkut, MySpace, Bebo, FaceBook, and LinkedIn, social book marking services like del.icio.us; and multiple initiatives from Google. Recently, the Hollywood film Snakes on a Plane took social computing to a new level by enlisting online fans to contribute to the making of the movie, as well as to its publicity campaign" (Biggs, 2006). This movie was the first of its kind, it had created a amazing fan following online even before it had started production since they asked people for advice n the movies storyline, and the online communities were buzzing with creative ideas they could include in the movie and the story included many user contributed ideas. It was a instant success both online and offline.

According to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, 2006), Almost 61% of 12-to-18-year-old have at least one personal profile on a social networking/ Online community site. The latest example of a online communities success is facebook, when facebook was created a few years back people could only register if they were part of a us university, it was used by many college students to keep track of events and other friends it was a easy and free fun way to be in a online community and they could choose to keep their privacy. Today facebook one of the internet's biggest online community catering to a wide range of people who want to keep touch with each other online.

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