Proud owners of a Facebook page in Washington, DC
Photo: Reuters
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Facebook Learns Russian
Social networking website Facebook has opened a Russian-language version of the site, Vedomosti newspaper writes. The launch will be officially announced on June 19 and it will bring the total number of languages that Facebook supports to 17. Facebook first appeared in 2004. For a long time, it was the second most popular website of its type, after MySpace. In April of this year, however, the sites had an equal number of visitors, 115 million. MySpace introduced its Russian-language version in January of this year.
The Russian analog of Facebook is called Vkontakte (Incontact). It has 13 million users. The most popular social website in Russia is Odnoklassniki (Classmates), which has 18 million users. According to the Romir market research company, 90 percent of active Internet users in Russia are familiar with Odnoklassniki. Moi Mir (My World) is known to 71 percent, and Vkontakte to 66 percent. Fourteen percent of Russian Internet users know MySpace and 12 percent know Facebook.
In its poll of 1300 Russian Internet users over the age of 18, Romir found that 72 percent of respondents had Odnoklassniki accounts. Forty-four percent of respondents had Vkontakte accounts. Two percent of respondents had MySpace accounts and the same number had Facebook accounts.
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