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Support systems that provide assistance and encouragement to individuals with physical or emotional disabilities in order that they may better cope. Informal social support is usually provided by friends, relatives, or peers, while formal assistance is provided by churches, groups, etc.

Any website designed to allow multipleusers to publish content themselves. The information may beon any subject and may be for consumption by (potential)friends, mates, employers, employees, etc. The sitestypically allow users to create a "profile" describingthemselves and to exchange public or private messages and listother users or groups they are connected to in some way.There may be editorial content or the site may be entirelyuser-driven. Content may include text, images(e.g. (http://flickr.com/)), video(e.g. (http://youtube.com/)) or any other media.Social networks on the the web are a natural extension ofmailing lists and buletin boards. They are related towikis like (http://wikipedia.org/) but typically do notallow users to modify content once it has been submitted,though usually you can publish comments on others'submissions.Different sites have different emphasis. For example, (http://friendsreunited.co.uk/) (one of the earliest suchsites) focusses on listing former acquaintances; (http://myspace.com/) is music-oriented; (http://linkedin.com/) aims to connect business partners; (http://del.icio.us/), (http://stumbleupon.com/) and(http://digg.com/) are for exchanging links to favouiriteweb sites. There are many more.Sometimes the social aspects are a side-effect of bringingtogether people with shared interests,e.g. (http://slashdot.org/) (IT), other times they becomemore important than the original purpose,e.g. (http://worldofwarcraft.com/) (fantasy gaming).