About Durov, Vkontakte and “small Internet”

Do not let children on the Internet.
The Internet from children is dumb.
Dmitry Goblin Puchkov

Ty in contact restored your page ??
not? and what then on the Internet doing ??????
Someone H @ ROD


Vkontakte, Facebook, mySpace, Odnoklassniki, yes, in principle, all social networks are evil. But as in any evil that is not absolute (and therefore, in general, any), there is a certain amount of good. For example, Facebook is paired with Twitter has become an excellent PR tool, a user feedback tool and a loyalty tool. But many articles have been written about this, but I haven’t yet seen a single implicit advantage of the social network Vkontakte.

Two things probably inspired me to write this article: recent Vkontakte updates and quotations that I appended with an epigraph. I am not a “contact person”, but I’m pretty active on this social network. Having stumbled upon Nastenka’s sincere surprise at the building, I thought hard and noticed with surprise that a rather large percentage of my acquaintances were sitting more and more in Vkontaktika and less often in the “Big Internet”. Before that, I used this social network as a tool: a notebook, some kind of ICQ (with the introduction of the xmpp connectivity, it became even more convenient) and a little social activity in the form of statuses, photos and comments to them. But before that, I did not think at all about the global plans of Vkontakte. Like most, I was too lazy to look for information and even just re-read the innovations of Vkontakte, but I strained my memory and began to analyze. In Facebook, I am inactive, but I read quite a lot about it, like many of the habr users, so I will compare these two social ones as similar and dissimilar.

Facebook is positioning itself as a link between sites and people. Likes of pages outside of Facebook is almost the main thing that determines Facebook popularity. Vkontakte, on the contrary, strive not to unite, but to absorb, to include in itself. Yes, in many ways Durov and his team copies the actions of Zakerberg, but they still act completely differently. A Vkontakte user does not want to leave his cozy shell of a site that he understands, he wants to have ICQ, IRC, shops, porn, children's content, and all companies inside Vkontakte. The user wants to vkontakte him Michael "supermachine, fuck everything that moves" Aslanova in Vkontakte and the girl agreed to give, and the president responded when the prices for "jaguar" and "Wings" reduced. The Vkontakte team is trying to incorporate the functionality of all successful social networks: the social foundation from Facebook, microblogging from Twitter, the geolocation part from 4square, scrobbling (in its infancy) and music recommendations from Last.fm, it’s strange that so far they have not done their Groupon. When Vkontakte was announced that they were introducing the “my documents” function, I immediately thought of google docs (I am sure that this service will be soldered over time), but this turned out to be just a file sharing service, which, in fact, is also not bad. How soon to wait for the service similar Facebook-mail?
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And what does this mean for us, geeks? Many people call Vkontakte bydloservisom, but few of them thought that the popularity of this bydloservis could be a boon to those who were not. I will draw a simple analogy, you live in the city, and suddenly in one part of it you organize a legal trash zone, here you have karaoke discos and fountains with a “jaguar” and apartments with “girls”. Of course, the entire "difficult" audience will begin to creep in there. So in our case, Vkontakte becomes either a collector for, well, I understand what, or, to be more tolerant, a playpen for children. Of course, this social network cannot swallow up the entire “non-cake” contingent of the Internet, but this reduces the degree of “shkoloty” in “our Internet” a little bit. It remains to be hoped that "the creators of Wikipedia will collect all the information of interest to them and fly away to their galaxy," but this, alas, dreams, dreams.

I have already written above that every evil has a reverse side, and, as a rule, it is not alone. I believe that Vkontakte is a blessing not only from a social point of view, but also from a technological point of view, the hussars are silent! Before you send a fan with a goof in my direction, read what I mean. Vkontakte manages to do something that many webmasters have failed. Namely, significantly reduce the proportion of IE6. How can you ask? Yes, just canceling his support. As you know, hamsters make up the majority of IE6’s audience, and the same hamsters make up most of Vkontakte. Cancel support => force users to update the browser. A site that has overtaken Yandex in popularity in runet can afford it.

I consider Vkontakte to be the service of sanitizing the RuNet. There is a feeling that the team of Durov wants to make a small Internet, where all the same toys as in all other places, but in one place. And then once and close: to offer providers to enter “Vkontakte” tariffs for mere pennies, but only inside the “Manezhik” servers and thereby clear the Internet of a significant part of “non-sales” users. Of course, I understand that they will not remove everyone, but a little unload the runet would not hurt.

Of course, maybe this is just my imagination, but I want to believe in it. It is quite possible, “The Dallas Plan does not exist, but it works,” and even if there are no such ideas in the plans of the Vkontakte team, they are still being realized.
Sources: vkontakte.ru; / dev / brain; spb.megafon.ru/tariffs/options/3dobsh/bezlimitnii_internet.html