5. Online Forums

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Social networking has truly come of age in terms of web-based discussion forums. Ireland’s largest online forum, Boards.ie, had its 10th birthday last February, and its 10 millionth post during August.

Other major Irish discussion boards include:

Forum tables. Source: Boards.ie

• P45.net (1.9 million posts by August 2008)
• Politics.ie (1.2 million posts)
• Thumped.com (1 million posts)
• Askaboutmoney.com (640,000 posts)

One indicator of the exponential growth of these forums: while it took Boards.ie five and a half years to reach its first million posts, it now gets that many posts every three months.

Some of its largest forums (Table left) have open-ended topics where a single thread of free-wheeling discussion can evolve over thousands of posts (Table right).

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