Web Conferencing an online communities & social media
Posted by cinnova on August 21, 2009
The field of Web conferencing software is growing at a breathtaking pace. In the summer of 1994 there were exactly two products in this category, both of them rather primitive freeware packages. Today there are well over 60 commercial and freeware products, many of them quite sophisticated, that support conferencing on the Web in one form or another.
With so many products available, the choice can seem overwhelming. But with a methodical approach, you’ll probably find that you can quickly whittle the list down to just a few candidates.
First, let’s define our terms. For our present purposes, conferencing is a form of group discussion that uses text messages stored on a computer as a communication medium. It does not include various types of real-time, or synchronous, communication, such as “chat rooms”, voice-based teleconferencing, or video conferencing.
A conferencing system is Web-based if it uses Web browsers and servers to provide most of its functionality. This is not as clear a distinction as it might sound. Most developers of conferencing software are hurrying to adapt their products to the Web, and the result is a lot of hybrid products that use the Web to a greater or lesser extent. Hence, the boundary between Web and non-Web conferencing software is a bit blurry.
