Vkontakte

VKontakte, ВКонтакте, internationally branded VK is a Russian social network service popular in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. VK offers a striking similarity in design and functionality to its US rival Facebook, and as such has been described as a "Facebook clone. Like Facebook, VK allows users to message contacts publicly or privately, create groups and events, share and tag images and video, and play browser-based games. One distinction of VK is its integration with torrent filesharing technology which allows users to share larger files.

As of February 2011, VK has around 135 million accounts, but has acknowledged that it has a major spam problem. VKontakte is ranked 35 in Alexa's global Top 500 sites and is the third most visited website in Russia.

In English, В Контакте or V Kontákte translates as "In Contact" or "In Touch".

Company

"LLC V Kontakte" was incorporated on 19 January 2007 with shareholders Vyacheslav Mirilashvili (60%), Pavel Durov (20%), Mikhail Mirilashvili (10%), and Lev Leviyev (10%).

The company is now 100% owned by offshore firm Doraview Limited, based in the British Virgin Islands. The full current ownership is not in the public domain, although Mail.Ru Group (formerly Digital Sky Technologies) have publicly acknowledged a stake of 32.5%. 

Privacy

Users have the ability to control the availability of their content. For instance, it is possible to hide one's pictures, videos, and entire pages. Users can also choose who can invite them to join groups, write personal messages, write on their wall, and so forth. It is claimed that the search engines do not index site content. Furthermore, the Russian market's dominating players, Yandex, Rambler, and, to a lesser extent, Google do not link to privacy-locked VKontakte pages, as well as users who choose to open their pages to the general public; in fact, search engines currently provide no indication whatsoever that any user is registered on VKontakte. Unless users post external links to their pages elsewhere, the only way to find a VKontakte page is by using VKontakte's own search protocols.

Languages

In September 2009 VK launched vk.com and translated the site into twelve international languages in an effort to expand the site's user base beyond Russia and the former Soviet Union. The site now has 67 languages available, including one novelty language dubbed "V Soyuze," which uses Soviet-era language and a red interface branded with the Soviet hammer and sickle.

Phishing

On July 30, 2009, the media reported that a text file, containing the data of 135,000 users, had spread across the Internet. Experts commented that the file contained passwords stolen from victims who had input their data at the phisher's website. Later, Kaspersky Lab said that the user list was collected by the Trojan Trojan.Win32.VkHost.an.

Popularity

After years of growth in user numbers, VKontakte's traffic ranking is now in decline. Once the most visited site in Russia and Ukraine according to Alexa.com, the site is now 5th in Russia and 3rd in Ukraine. Similar declines have been seen in Belarus (3rd to 4th) and Kazakhstan (2nd to 8th). Pageviews estimates and "time on site" have also been in decline for over a year. Among students and young people in Moscow and St Petersburg the site is losing market share to Facebook.

History

Founder Pavel Durov launched VKontakte for beta testing in September 2006, having just graduated from St Petersburg State University. On 1 October 2006 the domain name vkontakte.ru was registered. User registration was initially limited to within university circles exclusively by invitation, but the site still grew quickly. In February 2007 the site reached a user base of over 100,000 and was recognized as the second largest player in Russia's nascent social network market. In the same month the site was subjected to a severe DDoS attack which knocked it briefly offline. The user base reached 1,000,000 in July 2007, and 10,000,000 in April 2008. In December 2008 VK overtook rival Odnoklassniki as Russia's most popular social networking service.

On 6 October 2009 the site was launched in 20 international languages. In December 2009 the site had a user base of 50 million, and by November 2010 that had risen to 100 million. On 11 February 2011 VK reverted to user registration by invitation only.