What is vk.com

Hearten Side
4 min readNov 23, 2022

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VK (short for its original name VKontakte; Russian: ВКонтакте, meaning InContact) is a Russian online social media and social networking service based in Saint Petersburg. VK is available in multiple languages but it is predominantly used by Russian speakers. VK users can message each other publicly or privately, create groups, public pages, and events; share and tag images, audio, and video; and play browser-based games.

As of August 2018, VK had at least 500 million accounts. As of March 2022, it is the fourth most popular website in Russia. The network was also popular in Ukraine until it was banned by the Verkhovna Rada in 2017. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, VK became unavailable for Apple users worldwide from September 2022. According to SimilarWeb, VK is the 16th most visited website in the world.

History

VKontakte was incorporated on 19 January 2007 as a Russian private limited company. Founder Pavel Durov launched VKontakte for beta testing in September 2006, shortly after his graduation 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 company in Russia’s nascent social network market. In the same month, the site was subjected to a severe DDoS attack, which briefly put it offline. The user base reached 1 million in July 2007, and 10 million in April 2008. In December 2008 VK overtook rival Odnoklassniki as Russia’s most popular social networking service.

Some unknown fact about Vk.com

  • VK Is the Most Popular Social Media Website in Russia
  • VK is More Popular With Young Users
  • VK Offers a Lot In Terms of Profile Creation
  • VK Has a Complicated Political History
  • Russian Users Believe VK is Better than Facebook
  • VK Has Suffered Major Security Breaches
  • The Most Common Password on VK is “123456”
  • VK’s Website Design Rarely Changes

Features

Messaging. VK Private Messages can be exchanged between groups of 2 to 500 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 the 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 three types of communities. Groups are better suited for decentralized communities (discussion boards, wiki-style articles, editable by all members, etc.). Public pages is a news feed-orientated broadcasting tool for celebrities and businesses. The two types are largely interchangeable, the main difference being in the default settings. The third type of community is called Events, which are used for appropriately organizing concerts and events in an appropriate way.

Like buttons. VK like buttons for posts, comments, media, and external sites operate differently 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 or send it via private message to a friend.

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.

Synchronization with other social networks. Any news published on the VK wall will appear on Facebook or Twitter. Certain news may not be published by clicking on the logo next to the “Send” button. Editing a post in VK does not change the post in Facebook or Twitter and vice versa. However, removing the news in VK will remove it from other social networks.

SMS service. Russian users can receive and reply to a private message or leave a comment for community news using SMS.

Music. Users have access to the audio files uploaded by other users. In addition, users can upload the audio files themselves, create playlists and share audios with others by attaching to messages and wall posts. The uploaded audio files cannot violate copyright laws.

Answer by : Hearten Side

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