It is no more unreal to meet the world’s youngest billionaire who earned his billions on the Internet in McDonalds. Last year Mark Zuckerberg visited Moscow. He behaved like a most ordinary tourist. He had his photos taken in the most popular places and posted them on the social network. The Internet users reacted to Zuckerberg’s activity, interpreting the billionaire’s visit to Russia in their own way, by creating numerous demotivational posters and spreading them on the web. Zuckerberg’s meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was especially popular. The authors came up with numerous versions of what the IT billionaire talked about with the influential Kremlin official. Could he probably ask him to shut down Vkontakte.ru?
The official version says that during the Gorki-9 meeting Zuckerberg discussed with Medvedev the launch of a Facebook center of research and innovation in Russia, possibility of the American company’s cooperation with a number of Skolkovo startups, as well as the influence of social networks on politics. Russian mass media with a reference to the prime minister’s press secretary Natalia Timakova wrote that Medvedev jokingly asked Zuckerberg whether he understood correctly that Barack Obama will win in the election, because he has many more followers than Mitt Romney. Zuckerberg’s reply remains anyone’s guess. The Russian prime minister will keep as a souvenir a T-shirt with his FB address, a present from Zuckerberg. What did Zuckerberg get as a souvenir? Photos and demotivators.
LECTURE: PROGRESSIVE TOPIC, REGRESSIVE FORM
Zuckerberg spent his second day in Moscow, so to say, in the field. After the discussion of the prospects of launching an F center in the RF with the state’s leadership, the billionaire as a professional manager, actively started to look for human resources.
The invitations to the IT genius’s lecture at the Moscow State University were raffled off. But not all students were allowed to obtain them, only those who study at Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, and, strange as it may seem, Faculty of Journalism. Allegedly Zuckerberg wanted to communicate with the students majoring in the abovementioned specializations. I wonder why?
The Day had an opportunity to communicate with one of the attendees of the open lecture via the social network Vkontakte.ru, a competitor to Facebook in the CIS. Oksana SMIRNOVA, a fourth-year student of the Faculty of Journalism, MGU, commented on the fact of the IT billionaire visit to Moscow in quite a restrained manner, as well as his lecture in her university. The girl was negatively impressed by the organization of the meeting, to be more precise the fact that the format of the meeting did not match the content. Although Zuckerberg’s visit to Moscow was most simple, the lecture at the MGU followed the “best” examples of Soviet meetings with famous and talented people. Says Oksana:
“The meeting had a question & answer format, but it was not the audience who asked questions to Zuckerberg, but the author of the game ‘Cut The Rope’ Mikhail Lyalin. Inviting him was probably the greatest mistake of the organizers: Lyalin was speaking in a quiet and monotonous voice. As a result, Mark simply retold the story of Facebook, which can be found in Wikipedia.”
According to Oksana, only two female students on a first-grade pupil’s ruler-high heels were having fun, freely making photos of themselves on iPhones and iPads with Zuckerberg on the background, and the whole row had to observe their grimaces for about five minutes.
“When the audience was finally allowed to ask questions,” Oksana said, “People began to laugh: in reply to the question on his favorite book Mr. Zuckerberg became thoughtful for a while, chuckled, then became thoughtful again, looked back to see why the audience was laughing, uttered something like ‘No, no, no! I like reading…,’ but did not give any clear answer.”
According to the student, the rector’s arrival was especially disappointing:
“Then they invited the MGU rector, who came very late to the meeting, to take the floor. A third chair was brought on the stage for Sadovnychy (the audience welcomed it with a stormy applause, as if the rector was being carried in this chair), as well as a pale cardboard packet with a present for Zuckerberg, an MGU silhouette. The guest returned this gesture of respect by giving the rector a sweatshirt with a Facebook logo. The rector immediately started to pull it on, which the students again welcomed with an ovation. The only question Sadovnychy had time to ask Mark was ‘How did you like our students?’ Zuckerberg, however, did not seem to hear him in the fuss or probably kept silent out of tact.”
FACEBOOK VS. VKONTAKTE.RU
Ukrainian students can only dream of meeting Zuckerberg in Kyiv’s McDonalds or visit his lecture in one of the capital’s higher educational establishments. Taking into account the fact that Zuckerberg’s visit to Moscow was pragmatic, rather than sentimental-tourist, unfortunately, he has nothing to do in Kyiv. We have a different scale of the market, experts say. Reportedly by Socialbakers, last March the number of people on Facebook in Ukraine was more than 2 million, later this number dropped, and now it makes 1.969 million users. According to unofficial data, approximately one million people per day visit Facebook in Ukraine, and as far as the Liveinternet data goes, the annual number of Facebook visitors in Ukraine is about 2 million. In the Russian Federation last year the number of Facebook users was 200,000 million, which is more than the number of people currently living in RF.
Interestingly, in spite of the branch experts and state officials’ reports that the level of Internet’s penetration in Ukraine is 50 percent, which means that every second Ukrainian has an opportunity to surf the web freely, business says the scales of the social networks market are quite different. On one of the recent professional IT forums a manager for Yandex, Facebook and Vkontakte blog search, Anton Volnukhin reported that according to the data of the company where he works, almost 30 million users in Ukraine have accounts in social networks. Vkontakte is taking the lead with almost 20 million accounts, Odnoklassniki with its 6 million comes second, whereas Facebook (2 million) is on the last place. (Apparently, it is not correct to sum up the number of users of different social networks to define the total number of the audience. The author of this publication, like most of the readers, has registered accounts in two social networks. Apparently, there are people who use three or four accounts at a time. However, the 20-million audience of Russian product Vkontakte is a red beacon light, a reference point.) No less interesting is the data Yandex managers are avoiding to publicize. True, Facebook is so far second to its Russian competitor, but in all other niches of Internet production Western content is far ahead of the Russian one: Ukrainians use more frequently Google than Yandex, gmail.com than mail.ru.
“I am sure that my mailbox on gmail.com is safer to use,” an average Ukrainian Internet user Viktor Artemenko (a student, 21) says, “Besides, Google comes handier as a searching tool, and more understandable. There is no unnecessary information. I use Vkontakte because I registered my account there before Facebook appeared in Ukraine. I have many friends there and a page with many uploads [audios, videos, and photos. – Ed.]”
