In most traditional online communities, members have profiles that may display a picture, location, recent posts and membership tenure at most. These profiles can provide valuable context to the community, but they are often peripheral to the discussions and remain somewhat hidden.
In contrast, social networking communities have elevated the user profile to become more like a user homepage that displays a very rich and contextual set of information. The member home pages are not peripheral to the discussions or a subset of the community; they are at the very core of the system.
In traditional online communities, discussion is the center of the interaction and identity building. Members create relationships (and their own community identities) based on information they post in online discussions
identities can be built based on the display of the member’s choices of memberships in forums and connections to other people (among other things) on their home page.
Relationships in traditional communities are rarely made explicit.
Social networking, on the other hand, enables individual members to share explicit relationships with people and forums. Members use their home pages as rich representations of their preferences- which enable them to express their identity through explicitly shared forum membership and connections to other members.
Often, traditional online communities are managed so that new forums are built within a specific structure
An example of bucketed forums may be Technology-->Internet-->Online Communities-->Moderation Techniques-->Dealing with Spammers.
In social networking, the creation of new forums is done in a more emergent way and within a flatter hierarchy. A single member is free to create a new forum without placing it into a preset hierarchy.
New forums are a child of the whole system instead of being a child of a more general branch of the system. As new forums gain membership/popularity, they have equal opportunity to gain visibility in the system, similar to the weblog community.
Traditional discussion-based communities use discussion and/or organizations of discussions as the primary form of navigation. Members
Traditional discussion-based communities use discussion and/or organizations of discussions as the primary form of navigation.
The connections are held together by explicit relationships (people links) and interests (forum links) and do not depend on discussion content.