Top Web 2.0 Apps in Russia
Next in my series
on top Web apps in international markets is Russia. To remind you of the previous
countries profiled: Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea and United Kingdom.
Other country profiles coming soon include Spain, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand (if I
can rustle up enough web apps from the NZ2.0 mailing list!), Latvia, China (I still need
more contacts for this) and Ireland (also needs more data). Do contact me if you can give me information about
web 2.0 in your country.
My thanks to Alexander Dodonov and Anton Antich for all the information about Russian web apps.
Russia's Web 2.0 Market
Alexander says that Web 2.0 became popular in Russia only recently and there hasn't been much development so far - many projects are in alpha and their business model is not clear (hmmm, doesn't sound that different to the Valley!). Russian users use foreign web 2.0 services a lot, such as gmail.com, netvibes, del.icio.us. And livejournal.com is the most popular blog service for Russians - there are thousands of Russian communites on LJ.
Anton too says that web2.0 is at its infancy in Russia and that a lot of web apps are inspired by their western counterparts. He said there are 2 key things for a project to be successful in Russia:
1) It has to be fully localized.
2) It has to work with local payment systems, which are very different than in the US or UK - "that's something many of the english language startups don't get and that's why they are not going to be successful here, unless they change". Anton thinks this leaves a lot of proven and empty niches in Russia.
Top Russian web apps
blogus.ru - blog rating
Blugus rates blogs by calculating quantity of links from Technorati and blogs.yandex.ru (a local version of Technorati). The author of service is Anton Antich, one of the sources for this post. He is an employee of the Moscow office of Microsoft. Alexander said that blogus has drawn the attention of all the Russian blogosphere - "you can find almost all russian blogs in this service".
Its creator Anton told me that Blogus has big plans:
"Now there is a vision for "Blogus" to become an instrument of efficient discovery and tracking of relevant and interesting content on any topic in the Russian Blogosphere. To do that, we are creating something of a cross between Technorati and Memeorandum for blog readers - and a set of services that I cannot yet speak of for bloggers."
moikrug.ru - social network.
moikrug.ru is the Russian equivalent of linkedin.com (I've noticed that most of the countries I've profiled so far have a linkedin clone).
It's a social network for the professionals, created by group of developers from MIPT, which was started on 18 Nov 2005. It supports search on schools, high schools, universities and organizations. There is a job search service and collective blogs. It contains already tens thousand profiles, is regularly upgraded and the network effects are growing.
Anton says MoiKrug is doing quite nicely, although it's missing some of the features of LinkedIn. He says the quality of interactions is also lower, but thinks it will improve over time.
This is a collective blog, created by Jovan Savovich (http://jovan.ru/). It was created a long time ago, in November 2001. Alexander says that Jovan very carefully chooses members of the site community. He says Jovan is a person with imagination and that dirty.ru rules are strict - but fun.
dirty.ru is the most visited collective blog of the russian Internet (RuNet). There is a "dirty effect", same as the slashdot effect! There are over 10000 registered users - mainly programmers and designers, but also politicians, scientists, musicians and others.
The site has set of sections. For example, for free chatter exists a closed (registered use only) blog named "leper colony" (http://leprosorium.dirty.ru/). There are galleries of images by dirty members (http://fake.dirty.ru/) and a rich collection of quotes (http://quotes.dirty.ru/).
This is the Russian equivalent of Google. It has its own RSS reader (lenta.yandex.ru) and blog search (blogs.yandex.ru).
Other Russian Web Apps
Here are more Russian web 2.0 apps (c/o Alexander and Anton):
- revolver.ru - like dirty.ru, a russian equivalent of SlashDot
- toodoo.ru - social network. There are user accounts and each user indicates his favorite sites - and he can find another users who read the same sites.
- rss2email.ru - equivalent of FeedBleatz.
- habrahabr.ru - service for free journalism.
- comby.ru - clone of MySpace
- liveinternet.ru, diary.ru - blog services.
- utx.ambience.ru - system for categorization and social organization of blog posts.
- blogosphera.net - catalogue of favicons of different russian blogs
- talxy.ru - let's write together. Public collaboration.
- keep4u.ru - photo hosting and online photo editing.
- http://news2.ru - analog of digg.com, started about 6 months ago and is steadily growing in popularity.
- http://www.russianpodcasting.ru/ - portal of services for podcasters and podcasting consumers, started by Russian ex-MTV "VJ" Vasily Strelnikov. Anton says: "It is actually nothing more than a storage and a catalog now, but being the first in the area helps. The guys started mobile podcasting service some 1 year ago, but it didn't take off - I guess it was too early a concept. Pity - there are only about 20M internet users in Russia and about 100M mobile phones, so figuring out what to do with the latter market is a much more rewarding goal."
- http://telesa.tv/ - original project of home-grown flash "television" - shows, cartoons etc in flash and work similar to "real" tv. Entertainment oriented and quite popular, rumor has it it was acquired recently by a local strategic investor.
- http://blogsummit.ru - one of the first blog networks here. Also just started.
A huge thanks to Alexander and Anton for all the info about the Russian Web market.
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yet another bookmark/lins collection in Russia:
http://www.linkstore.ru
And another digg clone:
http://funlinks.ru/
http://ru.iiyes.com/
This is russian reddit:
http://ru.reddit.com/
www.7ruk.ru
According to their blog, MoiKrug.ru has passed the 100 000 users mark several months ago.
Do you have any plans profiling Ukraine (my native country)? It certainly less developed compared to, say, Russian but there are still some buzz going on, including atlaskit.com, i.ua and a bunch of others.
What about Quintura's visual search at http://www.quintura.ru
There are other russian social networks, such as ru.Reader2.com, ru.myflimz.net and other Kuchin's projects.
http://www.neznakomka.ru/ is a cool web 2.0 dating service
http://www.npj.ru/ - unique wiki+blog service and opensource engine.
http://beon.ru/ - russian anime comunity
"Top Web 2.0 Apps in Russia".
On China I like the China Web2.0 Review http://www.cwrblog.net/
For foreign folks: I bet you guys didn't get this joke at all!
When the author of the review (Anton Antich from Microsoft) puts his own little "garage project" (blogus) on the first place of the list, higher then some really huge community (dirty) and the Russian web-search company number 1 (yandex) - I wouldn't even call it "hidden marketing". No, no, nothing hidden at all! It's clear and really funny.
Dear Richard MacManus! The fact is, many other Russians can speak and write English, too. Not only slaves of Microsoft. Next time, look better for reviewers. Don't make us ROTFL.
Would allofmp3.com be considered "Web 2.0?" If so, it has to be at the top of the list.
Hey Lexa, a few points in response...
a) It was actually Alexander who gave me the info on Blogus initially. Anton's info came after that.
b) the list is unordered, so just because they're mentioned first doesn't mean they're the best. Although I agree it would've been great to get more info on Yandex. Please feel free to supply me with that info!
c) I've made a callout for international sources for my series a number of times now - and seeing as I don't speak Russian (to identify other possible sources) I'm reliant on whoever responds to my callouts :-)
So I invite you to by all means give me more info about the Russian market (readwriteweb@gmail.com). In fact, this is what comments are for ;-)
Personally I found the info Alexander and Anton gave me very informative and interesting - and I thank them again for taking the time to email me and supply me with all the details in this post.
Richard, two persons cannot give an authentic view, more likely a subjective sight. It is necessary to involve more people always.
a) Everything is subjective.
b) If you have corrections or suggestions to make, please do so either in the comments here or by email.
Frankly I can do without the lectures about what I should be doing. Tell me something useful and contribute some knowledge about the Russian market to this post.
For example, we have russian version of LJ, which has arisen in connection with Abuse Team actions. There are no any mention about Mazoo Networks, actually, the first russian blog networks also.
Also we have very popular, having a wide circulation, local version of Bash.org -- Bash.Org.Ru.
PS: Richard, fix the Russian Podcasting link -- http://rpod.ru, not a http://russianpodacsting.ru
Excellent .flint! The Russian podcasting link works OK, so I'll leave that as is for now. Thanks for all the new suggestions.
Doodka.com is a social network with blogging, communities, photo albums, tagging a la myspace for Russia and Ukraine.
What about that?
It's not in russian, but someday, I saw this website on the internet, www.pageflakes.com , it's a really nice startpage , where they have thousands of modules , and you can use together with many services , since i discovered i never stopped , it's a nice hint of web 2.0 apps.
www.scholar.ru - russian analog of scholar.google.com
Richard, thanks for taking the courage to write something about the Russian Web 2.0. I believe that some additional context would help you to understand why all this fuss has surfaced.
Unfortunately, corruption in Russia is omnipresent, including many internet-related publications. L E X A is simultaneously an editor at one such publication and an owner of a forum for women. He got really pissed off that you had not included his baby into the list. As his subsequent column shows he does not mind directly promoting his site without mentioning his relation to it. Also, he mentions several real Web 2.0 players and yet several others with a remote (if any) connection to anything typically associated with Web 2.0. Too bad that such a talented guy prositutes himself. I guess it is hard to make a living in Russia just by being a professional at a brand name firm.
I personally would exclude from your list utx.ambience.ru, blogosphera.net, talxy.ru, keep4u.ru and add blog.mail.ru and planeta.rambler.ru, as L E X A correctly had pointed out among others.
All that being said, I personally think it would be ethical in New Zealand to mention for a full disclosure that Anton, who had helped to compile your original list, is the owner of Blogus.
Thanks VB for your thoughts. I'm not really sure why there is such a fuss, but I get the feeling there are some cultural misunderstandings.
In any case, I did actually disclose in the post that Anton runs Blogus: "The author of service is Anton Antich, one of the sources for this post. He is an employee of the Moscow office of Microsoft."
Richard, I don't know what kind of anonimous coward is hiding under "VB" nick (no link is given), but let me assure you I don't own any "forum for women" :)
I used to do some work for Eva.ru for a couple of years, indeed (content management and development), but not anymore, and it make me no money to mention this site. It was like your consulting job, I suppose. I did it for different projects, so what? I don't think it should be a reason to exclude the biggest Russian women community from the list given in my article.
If I wanted to promote my OWN project, I had to somehow change the line of my story toward Japanese poetry called haiku :)
I think that comment #13 is ridiculous. People like Richard are doing their best trying to bring information and excitement about Web 2.0 from different parts of the world. It is impossible to know EVERYTHING about specific market, just like it is impossible to know EVERYTHING about anything.
His coverage is pretty on the money, so it does not warrant such arrogant rebuttal. He can't possibly know or understand all the intricacies and specifics of Russia these days. I left that country 15 years ago at the age of 19 and I can know longer understand all the nuances. So what depth and level of details are we looking for here?
I think that the fact that Richard took time to write about all these sites on his influential blog should be appreciated. And instead of critisizing you should thank him for sending traffic your way.
Alex
Dear foreign friends, now you can observe typical display of Russian mentality: fight because of details, not paying attention to the main thing.
flint, the main thing is we all must die some day.
But till that day, we got to find the way to the next whiskey bar.
And "The Doors" wasn't a Russian app.
and we launched Typepad in CIS (forme Soviet Union) with 3 portals at the beginning (www.wmjblogs.ru www.blogsit.ru and www.blogmania.ru). We expect to sign with a big media very soon.. Then if some western web companies want to do something in Russia, don't hesitate to contact us !! Tussian market is exciting but rules are a little bit different ;-))
regards
Pierre Mechentel
http://tubbydev.typepad.com and http://weblogrussia.blogsit.ru
Sucks, where are Web2 apps here? I can see regular old good SITES, not Web2 services...
Just ugly promo of Anton's Blogus (very new service, hardly half-year old).
Maybe have to look at http://mos2.ru, as an example for such apps?
As well as Dirty is community blog, http://boti.ru as well. As well as blogsummit.ru is falen project (with hardly 100 uniques), there are hunderds of such projects in Ru.Net...
so, before writing such articles, maybe look at http://ezhe.ru to figure who rules russian internet segment?
2lexa:Alexey, aren't you editor-in-chief on eva.ru?
Richard, please count for Letopisi.ru is an educational wiki-based project. Russian word 'Letopisi' means living chronicle in English. The main aim of the project is to help students and teachers from different areas of Russia and other countries to 'play' in wiki spaces in order to understand this environment for their research and other educational activities.
We do not want to 'copy' any of the recent Wikipedia look-like projects, but are willing to test WikiWiki as a tool for common knowledge, environmental thinking and tolerance.
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http://www.catalogr.ru - First katalog russian web 2.0
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Do not forget web 2.0 in Ukraine: Beengo.net
[...]We do not want to 'copy' any of the recent Wikipedia look-like projects, but are willing to test WikiWiki as a tool for common knowledge, environmental thinking and tolerance.[...]
My russian blog - http://asblog.biz/
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Another one young russian social network is http://www.sosedi-online.ru