As Agarwal and Liu (2008:1) state: “Individuals experience a sense of community, a feeling of belonging, a bonding that members matter to one another and their niche needs will be met through online interactions.”

In order to understand the how social networks and social activities behave on the internet we must understand the concept behind them which is virtual communities.

Chin and Chignell (2006) consider virtual community important because people tend to gain the benefits of social relations with other like minded people. They also define virtual communities as accumulated social discussions that emerged from the internet when people carry these discussions publicly with human passion and for a certain period of time to create networks of personal relationships in the internet, from this raised a new common point that members of a community experience which is “Sense of Community” (SOC) which they define as the feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith the members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together . ( Blogs)

An online community is a form of virtual community that exists online where members contribute positively to ensure it existence. It can take the form of an information system where anyone can post content, such as a Bulletin board system or one where only a restricted number of people can initiate posts, such as Weblogs. Online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life.

The development of networking and communication technologies in recent years has completely set a revolution in the way information is acquired, stored and disseminated. A significant transformation of the traditional face-to-face communities to online communities, has allowed users of the internet to reach out to their counterpart in a manner that is unimaginable. A critical review of online communities will be considered, with the aim to propose a sequence of success attributed to the migration from offline to online communities. Fichter (2005) recognizes considerable number of users in online communities as information consumers, ranging from reading world news to reviewing weather forecast. But acknowledge that many assumed the role of information providers with contribution to important topics such as wikis, blogs, more recently podcasts and videos.

Using collection and ordering guidelines, the remainder of this research work will be structured to review practitioner literature on online communities. Various definitions will be surveyed, classifications of online communities. The research will be narrowed down to understand the evolution of online communities and identify success factors in each stage of evolution, and security and privacy implications will be evaluated. The findings of the review can be organized as follows. Definitions will be explored, followed by the benefits that online communities bring to individuals, communities, and organizations. Conclusion will be drawn by providing recommendations for future research.( Online communities)

• Online communities
• Blogs: One of the most popular and common ways in the World Wide Web to give anyone the opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions to a worldwide audience is the blog which is an accessible venue to for people to express a variety of ideas.
• Wikis
• Wikis
• Photos and Videos
• Meetings