Week2

Our group have decided on the following five topics:

A. Synchronous Messaging
B. Collaborative Document Editing
C. Shared Repositories
D. Social Networks
E. Virtual Worlds
F. Asynchronous Messaging

We are now in stage of finalising our choice for the un-built building in our assignment. We have assigned each member of the group to do one of the five topics and mine was:
F. Asynchronous Messaging.

Definition
Asynchronous Messaging in definition is “A form of collaborative communication, whereby communication between two people or more, two companies or a group of people is not instant. Fire-and-forget information exchange. Participants in an asynchronous messaging system don't have to wait for a response from the recipient, because they can rely on the messaging infrastructure to ensure delivery. This is a vital ingredient in loosely coupled systems such as web services, because it allows participants to communicate reliably even if one of the parties is temporarily offline, busy, or unobtainable.”

Examples of asynchronous messaging are emails, forums, fax and blog.

Emails
E-mail, short for electronic mail and often abbreviated to e-mail, email or simply mail, is a store and forward method of composing, sending, receiving and storing messages over electronic communication systems. The term "e-mail" applies both to the Internet e-mail system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and to X.400 systems, and to intranet systems allowing users within one organization to e-mail each other. Intranets may use the Internet protocols or X.400 protocols for internal e-mail service supporting workgroup collaboration. E-mail is often used to deliver bulk unsolicited messages, or "spam", but filter programs exist which can automatically delete some or most of these, depending on the situation.

Forums
A forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user-generated content. Internet forums are also commonly referred to as Web forums, message boards, discussion boards, (electronic) discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards, or simply forums. The terms "forum" and "board" may refer to the entire community or to a specific sub-forum dealing with a distinct topic. Messages within these sub-forums are then displayed either in chronological order or as threaded discussions.
Such forums perform a function similar to that of Usenet newsgroups and the dial-up bulletin board systems that were numerous in the 1980s and 1990s. Early web-based forums date back as far as 1996. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology, computer games and/or video games, sports, fashion, religion, and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of topics. Internet slang and image macros popular across the internet are abundant and widely used in internet forums.

Fax
Fax is a telecommunications technology used to transfer copies (facsimiles) of documents, especially using affordable devices operating over the telephone network. The word telefax, short for telefacsimile, for "make a copy at a distance", is also used as a synonym. The device is also known as a telecopier in certain industries. When sending documents to people at large distances, faxes have a distinct advantage over postal mail in that the delivery is nearly instantenous, yet its disadvantages in quality and its proprietary format have relegated it to a position beneath email as the prevailing form of electronic document transferral.

Blog
A blog is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.

Reference
http://www.looselycoupled.com/glossary/asynchronous%20messaging
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forums
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog