The history of the creation of “VKontakte” - the launch of the network
Together with his brother Pavel Durov in 2005, he began to develop the idea of the VKontakte social network. The idea of a correspondence site that would work all over the world appeared after a friend from abroad came to visit Pasha. The programmer realized how difficult it was for him to keep in touch with friends who live far away. You need to understand that previously people almost never corresponded or communicated on the Internet, and if this happened, it was only by email.
Inspired by the history of the social network Facebook, Durov decided to develop a similar site. Its main feature was that instead of a simple email address, information about users is stored there.
In 2006, Pasha Durov began developing VKontakte and within a few months the first visitor registered there. Initially, only a user who received an invitation from others could create an account online, because the site was closed. But after VKontakte began to grow, the founders decided to make it open and confirm the registration of everyone.
Initially, “VKontakte” was called “Students.ru”, but almost immediately the social network was renamed.
The developers said that the site will be completely free and will not contain advertising.
Comments: 1
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Author of the article Irina Rusanova
Consultant, author Popovich Anna
Financial author Olga Pikhotskaya
- Doronin P.N.
09.25.2021 at 13:34 Oh my God!
And not a word about Olisherchek Usmonov? Laughter, and that's all. Well, in Russia now it’s not camouflage to call true names Reply ↓
Development of the largest social network in Russia
Pavel Durov perfectly understood the importance of proper advertising of the resource, so he connected new tools and technologies for website promotion. Literally a few months after the launch, the company had to transfer the social network to another platform and expand capacity, because the performance was not enough for the number of users.
At the beginning of 2007, VKontakte was included in the list of the 50 most promising sites on the Runet.
At the same time, the Durov brothers began to introduce technologies to make a profit. At first these were messages with which the user could increase his rating. These SMS were paid, and the profits went to the development of the company. Then they added the ability to send paid gifts to friends, after which online games appeared on the site in which it was possible to sell advertising.
Conflicts and Durov’s departure from VKontakte
In 2008, more than 20 million users registered on VKontakte, and in 2021, almost a billion people visit the site daily.
Problems with the social network VKontakte appeared at the end of 2010, when its popularity reached its maximum. The Mail.ru Group company constantly tried to buy out the network, and they announced that they intended to buy 100% of the shares and then merge it with the Odnoklassniki platform. There were rumors that users were willing to pay about $2 billion for this deal.
After several months of unsuccessful negotiations, Pavel Durov posted a photo on Instagram, which he signed “Official response to the trash holding Mail to its latest attempts to absorb VKontakte.” In the photo, the programmer shows his middle finger.
Partners and shareholders of VKontakte supported the idea of merging the company with the holding, so Durov’s sharp response caused a negative reaction. Mirilashvili and Leviev sold their shares (in total less than 50% of the company) to United Capital Partners. This fund took ownership and began to manage its share of the VKontakte company. They sued Pavel Durov for allegedly spending the company's money on his own projects. We are talking about Telegram. Despite the fact that the programmer proved that this messenger was created with his personal money, they continued to sue him.
In 2014, Pavel Durov sold his 12% stake and on April 1 announced that he was leaving the VKontakte company.
Following Durov, many programmers and analysts left the social network, whom he took with him to the new company. He left Russia and received a St. Kitts and Nevis passport.
How can you determine the age of a website page using technical methods?
First, let's look at the ways in which you can determine the moment when a page was created. You can check its age using a special HTML code, Sitemap or server response. A disclaimer (notice of disclaimer) may also help, but is not guaranteed. For example, a site may move - then the creation date will be updated, which in fact will incorrectly reflect the real age of the pages.
1. Using the “Site:” operator in Google and searching through dates
Using the “Site:” operator in the search engine, you will notice that the creation date of the FB page is not visible. You can clearly see it in the screenshot below. Sometimes, of course, miracles happen. For example, if the user takes a certain period of time to study. Let's take the period for the year from January 1, 2021 to January 1, 2019. We get the date - 09/28/2018.
Google's Brute force process when the "Site:" operator is replaced with "Allinurl:". There are cases when you don’t need to use operators: you can type the site address into a search engine.
Remember: for Google, the date the page was created is not always the date of the first crawl, as with the Yandex service. But we will talk about this below. If the Google bot notices some updates on the site pages, the system will change the date. Webmaster states that the date is determined based on various factors. One of them is the markup data presented on the site page.
2. Finding dates from Sitemap
Sitemap, or site map, is a program document that contains a list of links for search. Using a sitemap, you can determine the age of pages. However, looking at the screenshot below, we see that the search engine did not find anything.
Remember: sitemap generation occurs automatically. In this case, the attribute that shows the date the page was last updated may be incorrect.
3. Page Info in Firefox
In the screenshot below we can see that the meta tags did not give us any information about the creation date. The date in the “Last changes” line, according to the server, shows when changes were made to the resource. Thus, on large sites such as Facebook, the date and time of the last visit to the page will be equal to the date and time of the last changes to the site.
It looks like the page has been modified, but it hasn't:
In this case, Firefox shows more relevant information from the page. Google still shows 2021.
4. Tracking by date of publication of pictures
It is not always possible to determine the date of creation of the page by the date of the pictures. Pictures may be closed for indexing. Often the pages also contain other people's content. In this case, it will be impossible to determine the correct age.
The date the picture was published can be determined using a saved copy of the page. However, we do not recommend using this method. Google saves the page after the bot crawls it. For large sites with huge traffic, the age of the pages will be young, although in fact this is not the case. Yandex has another problem: an old copy of the page may be saved, which no longer corresponds to reality.
As you can see in the screenshot, the age of the Facebook page is significantly different from the date that the “Site:” operator showed us.
Changing the policy and work of VKontakte
After the Mail.ru Group holding company completely absorbed the social network and came under the management of Alisher Usmanov, many changes happened to the platform. And despite the fact that many employees work there, as during the leadership of Pavel Durov, innovations are subject to serious criticism.
- The ability to embed videos from a social network site on other resources has disappeared.
- The beginning of cooperation with Channel One, which began actively publishing its videos. They can be monetized using built-in advertising.
- If someone publishes a video that was on this channel (that is, creates pirated content), then the site immediately deletes it.
- Users who want to watch a movie are sent to the Amediateka resource, and the network receives a percentage for the transitions.
- “VKontakte” is essentially turning into an advertising platform.
- More mobile and video advertising is appearing.
- The site becomes more convenient for business, rather than user communication.
- The metric is enabled for posts in groups that have more than 10 thousand users.
- Changing the appearance of the social network.
- The emergence of paid music.
These changes are both positive and negative, but the main reason for criticism is that the network is constantly “falling”. In addition, the resource significantly reduced the level of user security by disclosing personal information to the authorities... Trust in the site has fallen, so many decide to switch to other social networks.
How to find out how many days you have been on VK through the source code
There is another way to find out how long I’ve been on VK, without the help of special services. Any browser on a PC or phone is suitable for using this technique. In this case, the search for the necessary information is carried out through the source code. The action algorithm is as follows:
- Copy the link and paste it into the address bar. It is necessary that the URL column contains a full link to the profile with the user ID.
- Open the source code of the page.
- Look at the registration date.
Now let’s take a closer look at the nuance of how to find out how many days I’ve been on VK. There should be a line like this in the source code. The first four digits are the year, followed by the month and day. As for the subsequent numbers, these are hours minutes and seconds. The last four characters are the time zone. In other words, you can obtain information with maximum accuracy.
The method discussed above will not work if the VK page has been deleted. But you can get information with the help of other users whose IDs are a little nearby (closer or further).
