The 21st century is the era of globalization – the characteristic feature of which is the rapid growth of information technologies and discoveries. Shorter ago, social networks emerged in this system. Social media is an invaluable resource for finding meaningful connections with others and different companies. They’re hugely important for sharing amazing photos on Instagram or sending out messages on something like VK, social networks are so pervasive to our lives now that we couldn’t imagine life without them.
The social media site, Vkontakte, was co-founded by programmer Pavel Durov in 2006. The original intention of this project was to create an opportunity for students and graduates of universities to network with each other easier. You could only join by getting an invitation and your name had to be verified. After registration became public, Vkontakte started to gain popularity. By 2007, the site had 3 million registered users, which made it the second most popular website in Russia (after Runet).
Facebook is the most popular social network in the world, with more users than any other. It includes more corporate customers than any other social network.
VKontakte sets itself apart from Facebook in several ways, including the quality of profile pages, the usability of its desktop ranking system, and even its openness to third-party applications.
The interface, speed, unobtrusive advertising and the formation of a friend feed – these are just some of the many advantages VKontakte has to offer. The one issue is that it’s only available in a Russian language mode.
Recently, Facebook users are getting quite vocal about what they want. Thankfully it is not that, we still have that and everything seems to be fine. Yet people are not content. It’s understandable that they would also be looking at VKontakte – it being such a large social network in Russia, giving people what Facebook does but with more functionality. I’m not immune to the charm of this social network. A short, modest blog post about them caused a storm of emotions and earned me a certain number of likes. Already the PR director of VKontakte, Vladislav Tsyplukhin, reported on the mood of the public and everyone started to cheerfully hash-tag pages on VKontakte.
Summary of VKontakte’s claims: they have less censorship, they focus more on privacy, and they have a more secure user-generated content system.
1. One thing that has been noted is the problem with the speed. There’s been a lot of complaints and criticism about how the Facebook interface is slow, where it takes exponentially more time to perform certain actions. VKontakte has a much better interface which means that interaction with local network operators can be much quicker.
2. Interface. Facebook’s attempt to cover all the possibilities has been bad for the user experience. Facebook conducted an experiment in 2012 where they created a lightweight version of their site, lite.facebook.com, that did not include any ads or other distractions (like video games). However, users loved it so much that Facebook had to close it ‘due to overwhelming demand which exceeded its capacity’. The Facebook interface has been overloaded for a while. Now it’s overloading with ads.
3. Advertising deserves a separate mention. There are at least two offers in the feed to like the page that your friends foolishly liked. This offer is likely being generously paid for by the advertiser. This is also true on mobile, as the option to “like” a page still occupies 70% of 20 years ago. It also has traditional advertising blocks at the bottom of the screen which have never provoked any excitement or emotions. This is a so-called sponsored post, which makes it possible to explicitly promote a Facebook post or Twitter update. Companies can do this too, but individuals are not allowed to do so.
4. The formation of a Facebook Friend Feed brings in more questions and finds fewer answers. This is because the Facebook algorithm aims to give us content that interests us most, changing as we use it. Likes from friends are shown, so you can stay up to date on what your friends are liking. If you write not directly as well, but through some kind of application, the chances of your entry being seen are even less. Sometimes it’s really convenient when the computer decides for you, but wouldn’t it be better if someone else helped?
Facebook has many other features people love, such as being able to edit posts and tags, see only links shared by friends, remove unnecessary tabs and use only the features you want to! Some point to the large library of audio-visual content as the reason for VKontakte’s success and while that is true, there are more points to consider. After all, we’re talking about communication. Sharing things quickly and conveniently is also a very nice thing.
Some people say we should just leave Facebook. Wait! Don’t jump to conclusions. Sure, there are a lot of good reasons to use Russian social networks instead, but there’s something that still plays an important role in Russia. VKontakte is a hugely local platform, which offers less in this globalized age of social media.
It’s not just about censorship and restrictive laws, you also have to consider the distance between groups of people. This can create impractical situations such as slow communication. Whereas many people find regular communication among colleagues from the same country to be enough, there’s no avoiding the need for international relations. In general, it’s the same as using mail.ru to talk to your compatriots and for people from first world countries to write exclusively from gmail.com is strange and inconvenient. Leonid Bershidsky discusses the ‘frightening locality’: “St. Petersburg without me,” he jokes.
People have a hard time finding a logical way to deal with their bad feelings on Facebook. This means that there will be more people on Twitter and Google+. If the first has already made a name for itself in history, then it’s unclear if the second will do (although Google’s social network was quickly adopted). Although usage rates in Russia are much lower than in the West, we don’t think that Facebook will be hit badly by this development. It’s worth noting, however, that their shares may suffer judging from what’s happened to Twitter over the last six months.
