An Online forum is an internet software which allows users to virtually come together and generate content by participating in group discussions and sharing information on a variety of subjects. In fact, this is the most basic way of building an online community for a company, so marketing and product development teams can be directly in touch with their community of end-users and partners.

A Blog (shortened from weblog) is an internet software on which an individual (or a group of users) produces an ongoing narrative in form of text (blog), video (vlog), or audio (podcast) for an audience. The audience, on the other hand, responds back by posting comments or ranking the published items. The audience can also subscribe to the stream of published content using dynamically generated Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds from the blogging software.

Blogs are among the most powerful online social marketing tools used by companies of all sizes. Blogs are also used by individual Journalists, Developers, Designers, Researchers, Scientists, Artists, and Hobbyists who wish to share their ideas with the outside world or promote certain concepts, services, or products.

A Wiki is an internet software on which users collaborate on writing documentation and articles in a virtual environment. The result of this collaboration turns the Wiki into a useful knowledge repository for everybody to benefit from.

Research, Development, and Marketing teams use Wikis to build knowledge repositories about their products, services, and day-to-day operation protocols. A Wiki is especially useful for maintaining the knowledge within a company when employees leave an organization, because the new employees can use the same Wiki as a reference and educational tool about the organization's day-to-day operation. 

Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites on the internet with more than 60 million registered members. 60% of them login daily and 85% login at least once a week. According to Chris Hughes, spokesman for Facebook, "People spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook."

Facebook is also a framework for developers (that would be us!) who build applications that interact with the core functionalities of this website for marketing and service delivery purposes. A facebook application can either be exclusive to the facebook platform, or instead bridge a free standing website on the internet to the facebook social network.

OpenSocial is an open standard service developed first by Google and released on Nov. 1st 2007. This technology is used for developing applications that interact with core functionalities of a group of participating social networking sites such as  Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, NetModular, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Six Apart; as well as business-oriented networking companies LinkedIn, Tianji, Salesforce.com, Viadeo, Oracle, and Plaxo.

A Content Management System (CMS) is used for managing the content of a website. In the past, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, companies had to hire a web design company to build all the website pages one by one, but today a CMS application is used to manage, search, organize, and publish the content of a website using a secure online dashboard which is available only to the website administrators.

A simple CMS can be used for building a small website. The same content management can be further customized for developing the following types of websites:

• Corporate website
  
• Online Catalog (eCatalog)
  
• Online Portfolio (ePortfolio)
  
• Online Retail Store (eCommerce)
  
• Real Estate application (eRealtor)

Intranets are specialized forms of Content Management driven websites where all or part of the content is only available to a designated group of people such as a company's employees or partners. An Intranet is often mentioned as the company's internal website. It is quite possible that a company's public website contains an Intranet within itself.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Learning Content Mangement Systems (LCMS) are specialized forms of Content Mangementment Systems (CMS) used for creating, organizing, and delivering educational material to students, employees, or other types of subscribed users. Educational material is delivered as text, audio, video, visual presentations, or interactive online tools.

eLearning applications may be implemented as Intranets, meaning that users (students) have to register with the system in order to access the educational material, or they can be implemented as Social Networking environments where users (students) have the opportunity to communicate with each other and engage themselves in a variety of group learning activities and discussions.