Internet offers a broad range of possibilities for individuals to express themselves to the world. These range from websites, web logs to online graffiti and of course, online forums and communities. All these together form the synergies of the new world of communications over the internet with innovative, new forms of interactivity, across the globe.

Online forums have played an important part in making the web's collaborative features popular as these provide people with common interests a platform to take part in discussions and share their ideas with the world. Online forums sometimes act like a discussion board, then on the other can also act as a support zone for a company’s website where customers can gather and get their problems solved by experts from companies as well as other users like them. Communities on the other hand, give people a way to get together in a different way, which looks like passive in nature but remains quiet active due to always happening user activities. Communities exist in many different shapes and sizes including social networking websites to presence services and online gaming communities etc.

Some of the most common online forums and communities on the internet as of now include YouTube, Dailymotion.com, Metacafe.com, Facebook, Orkut, Linked In, Twitter, ArsTechnica.com, Neowin.net, MSDN Forums, Thinkdigit.com forums, Microsoft TechNet forums, XDA Forums, Demanoid.com, Xbox Live community etc, to name a few. The fact is, these services account for at least 60% of the total internet bandwidth usage, and that is saying something. Broadly these services can be categorized into video sharing sites, gaming communities, social networking sites, mobile forums, file sharing communities, presence services, technology forums and blogs etc. But the underlying concept of all these is same, to let users of matching interest interact with each other in the way they want, anonymously if they like, from any part of the world.

Online gaming has also made popular another form of communities that work quiet differently from these but serve the same purpose. The advent of MMORPG games (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) has brought forward this change. Games such as Second Life and Warcraft have become so much popular due to their collaborative nature and the element of global collaborating community based efforts that it becomes impossible for one to get out of it once they are in. Users of these games collaborate using the forums, chat and social networking communities forming a type of virtual global colony.