History of vk.Com
Founder Pavel Durov launched VKontakte for beta testing in September 2006, having just graduated from St Petersburg State University. The following month, 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. The user base reached 1 million in July 2007, and 10 million in April 2008. In December 2008 VK overtook rival Odnoklassniki.ru as Russia's most popular social networking service.
Pavel
Durov, the creator of Vk.com social network, on his 26th birthday,
10 October 2010.
Company
V Kontakte was incorporated on 19 January 2007 as a Russian limited liability company. Founder and CEO Pavel Durov owns 20% of shares (although he has majority voting power through proxy votes), and a trio of Russian investors, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, Mikhael Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev (not from Africa-Israel Investments), own 60%, 10% and 10% respectively. The company is now completely 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) has publicly acknowledged a stake of 39.99%. Subsequently, the full ownership structure was published.
The company is controlled by Pavel Durov, founder and CEO. On 29 May 2012 Mail.ru Group announced that it has decided to yield control of the company to Durov by offering him the voting rights on its shares. Combined with Durov's personal 12% stake, this gives him 52% of the votes.
VK canceled their IPO plans, citing unsatisfactory market conditions after Facebook's IPO blunder.
Current shareholder structure as of 2011 is: 12% is owned by Vkontakte founder’s Pavel Durov, 8% by his partner Lev Leviev, and 40% by Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and members of his family. Mail.ru Group owns a 39,99% stake, having acquired 7.44% from Pavel Durov and other shareholders last month for $111.7 million.
Website Functionality
VK
home page for a logged in user, September 2012
As with most social networks, the site's core functionality is based around private messaging and sharing photos, status updates and links with friends. VK also has tools for managing online communities and celebrity pages. The site allows its users to upload, search and stream media content, such as videos and music. VK features an advanced search engine, that allows complex queries for finding friends, as well as a real-time news search.
Messaging. VK Private Messages can be exchanged between groups of 2 to 30 people. An email address can also be specified as the recipient. Each message may contain up to 10 attachments: Photos, Videos, Audio Files, Maps (an embedded map with a manually placed marker) and Documents.
News. VK users can post on their profile walls, each post may contain up to 10 attachments – media files, maps and documents (see above). User mentions and hashtags are supported. In case of multiple photo-attachments the previews are automatically scaled and arranged in a magazine-style layout. The news feed can be switched between all news (default) and most interesting modes. The site features a news-recommendation engine, global real-time search and individual search for posts and comments on specific users' walls.
Communities. VK features two types of communities. Groups are better suited for decentralised communities (discussion-boards, wiki-style articles, editable by all members etc.). Public pages are a news feed oriented broadcasting tool for celebrities and businesses. The two types are largely interchangeable, the main difference being in the default settings.
Like buttons. VK like buttons for posts, comments, media and external sites operate in a different way from Facebook. Liked content doesn't get automatically pushed to the user's wall, but is saved in the (private) Favorites section instead. The user has to press a second 'share with friends' button to share an item on their wall.
Privacy. Users can control the availability of their content within the network and on the Internet. Blanket and granular privacy settings are available for pages and individual content.