Newsgroups could be thought of as the secret society of the Internet, at least until Google unveiled them in 2001 through Google Groups, after buying the Usenet archive from . Newsgroups are, in reality, the mother of all social Websites, the dinosaur of social networking. They came out before the Web existed and at the point when the Internet was used exclusively by scientists and the military. [Source: Encyclopedia of Social Networks; Newsgroups]
newsgroups
networks and networking
concepts
social networking communities