
Russian Exact Copy of Facebook - andre
http://vkontakte.ru/
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whacked_new
China has at least two copies. of those I remember, faceren.com and
xiaonei.com.

one of them was sold for around 5M iirc. The concept works, the entry barrier
is low, being copied is inevitable unless you move very fast.

This isn't a bad thing imo though; the local dev teams understand local
culture better. faceren and xiaonei both looked like carbon copies of facebook
when I saw it on TechCrunch (or something). If you look at faceren now it's
completely different.

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willarson
I wonder what the mindset is of someone who duplicates--exactly--not only the
functionality, but everything down to the layout and color scheme. It doesn't
seem that this kind of venture is going to penetrate very far, especially
outside of Russia. Then again, the recent article posted about Friendster
mentions they are focusing on smaller Asian countries (Malaysia, etc). I guess
this is the web equivalent of a niche company: trading potential success for
potential market safety.

~~~
andre
I don't think they are looking to penetrate other countries that don't speak
Russian. Although USA and other non-eastern-european countries are available
to register under, you still need a Russian connection somewhere for it to be
useful.

I also have issues with handing over too much of my info to a Russian company,
as their track records aren't that clean.

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andre
It's written in Russian, but pretty much everything is the same. From the
"Wall" feature, to posting of pictures, Groups, ETC. They did add a little bit
of new features, but not much.

