It's everything you remember from Facebook circa 2006 . The only catch is, it's in Russia.
Via: brunjaa
The blue is just the way I remember it.
So are the columns, the fonts, the gifts. It's an almost-exact replica of the social network I joined as a rabbity, awkward college student. I had assumed it was gone forever, but here it is. The old Facebook. It lives. In Russia.
Welcome to VK.com, Europe's largest social network and the fourth most visited site in Russia. As of February, it boasted 150 million users — putting it just ahead of Facebook among Russian users.
It's a straightfoward knockoff of Facebook from another, more beloved era: the same features, the same layout, even the same shades of blue. Unlike Facebook, the design hasn't changed since 2006, so it's blissfully free of newfangled gadgetry like newsfeeds and timelines. While Zuckerberg & Co have been rolling out features, VK has been sealed in amber.
It's a different world of social media, without rollouts or redesigns, without the driving need for reinvention.
My new VK profile, complete with interests, contact info, along with something that looks suspiciously similar to a Facebook wall. The wall is still a tiny afterthought in this time capsule, stuck in the lower right, long before the total page tyranny of the Timeline. The rest of the page still looks like a student directory.
For comparison's sake, here's a Facebook profile circa 2006. No one's going to refresh this page five times a day, but it also won't give you the twitchy feeling of information overload. In those days, the social graph didn't move quite so fast.
