The most popular social network in Runet today. Every day, the site is visited by several million users, which is several times higher than the traffic of the main competitors of the site.
Appeared in VKontakte in the summer of 2006, but November 22, 2006 is considered the official birthday of the site. It was on this day on the forum of the site spbgu.ru (site of students of St. Petersburg State University), a message from its owner Pavel Durov appeared, in which he invited everyone to join the new service. On that moment In contact with was a closed service, in order to join it you had to receive an invitation, the service was positioned as a predominantly student service, designed to maintain links between students and university graduates. Pavel Durov, who today is the general director of VKontakte LLC, has repeatedly asserted and continues to assert that the project has remained such. Owners Vkontakte they are in no hurry to turn a social project into a business enterprise, the absence of intrusive advertising is declared.
Name In contact with, as you can find out on the page of Pavel Durov, he came up with it himself, and for a long time he was dissatisfied with some dissonance of the name. But, on the one hand, such a name accurately reflected the purpose of the site - maintaining contact between university graduates, and, on the other hand, Vkontakte once again confirms: it’s not the name that makes the product or service beautiful, but quite the contrary, even a not very successful name can be liked by users if a quality product stands behind it and the most wonderful name does not save the unsuccessful one from failure.
The dissemination of information about the site mostly took place through word of mouth, which increased the already rather large daily influx of visitors, cooperation with the company Apple. A competition was held, the users were rewarded with iPods , and the team In contact with - Significantly increased influx of users.
For today Vkontakte left behind all possible competitors, primarily the project Classmates, which appeared at about the same time, due to the fact that it never stopped in place, new functions and services are constantly appearing in which the target audience may be interested. Beyond the social network Vkontakte is the largest audio and video hosting, soon they promise to launch the ability to pay for purchases on the Internet using the “Money in Contact” service, and the “In the State” service is already working, allowing users to look for work or employees.
The service is often accused of making available the personal data of users almost to government agencies, of distributing pornography and other mortal sins. However, exactly the same can be blamed on any social network and the entire Internet as a whole. A really serious reproach to the network can only be considered if its “accidental” similarity with another social network - Facebook. The creators of the site do not hide what exactly Facebook inspired them to create a Russian-language analogue of the network. The basic principles and even the design of the site were borrowed. At the same time, of course, the main work on creating the site, regulating the base of educational institutions, creating new functions was performed by the creators themselves. Vkontakte, and the ideas of social networks were generally in the air. But it would be interesting to know why the design of the site, which immediately evokes associations with Facebook? Today, such a visual coincidence can interfere In contact with develop outside the Russian-speaking Internet, and such attempts are already being made: under the domain vk.com the network is moving into the foreign market (the service is available in more than fifty languages).