[Air-L] Interrelations of "Virtual Communities" and "Social Networks"

[Alexander Semenov]

Hello, everybody!
I was thinking about the following question: What is the interrelation  
between notions of "virtual communities" (VC) and "social networks"? 2  
variants came up to my mind:
1) "Social networks" is a part of VC;
2) VC structure tend to change toward social networks.
First of all I mean technological aspect of the problem, not substantive.  
We all know that as soon as there appear a virtual community it can be  
studied from network paradigm. But what I wanted to know is the following  
- will there be a total evolution of "classical" virtual communities (BBS,  
listservs, chats, etc) toward technologically new VCs (Facebook, Myspace,  
ect) or the divercity of VC's forms will remain and there will be some  
other brances of evolution.
What do you think?