International ripoffs of successful web companies can be found everywhere, from Frazr, the German Twitter clone, to Digg Malaysia, the Malaysian clone of the news-ranking site Digg.
Not to be outdone, the Russian social network Vkontakte (or “virtual contact”) has copied Facebook’s look and feel almost exactly — not to mention its growth rate. See Alexa graph and screenshot gallery, below.
Copying Facebook has already turned out to be lucrative in other countries.
In Germany, Facebook clone StudiVZ was bought by a German publishing company for around $100 million; in China, Facebook clone Xiaonei was reportedly bought by a larger Chinese internet company for an undisclosed amount.
Vkontakte’s increasing Alexa rank:
Vkontakte’s brilliant design:
FaceBook Copycats Flooding | Read more @ Venture Beat
Copycat strategy just works. I still wonder why Facebook is not available in French. Creates a lucrative niche for stunt websites to cater to their own language market. By the way, vkontakte.ru has no ad revenue streams. Looks like it is a just-for-fun project.
If all other nations have their “clones of facebook” as you call it,why didn’t they make this problem to you as Russians did? I don’t support facebook at all! After 3 days from creating my profile in facebook,i received some stuff from my friends like advertisement or game,and i didn’t know that it may be dangreous accepting those stuff in that site.So as a result my hotmail was hacked. And i learned that it was because of my facebook account! There’s nothing very special about facebook,hi5 is better,it’s more creative and unique!!!
If people thought like you noone would be on vkontakte.ru
Minor correction: vkontakte is translated as “in contact” or “staying in touch”.
Minor correction: vkontakte is translated as “in contact” or “staying in touch”.