Due to the recent controversies surrounding Facebook, especially with its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, there have been talks in the Philippines of some people moving on to a new social platform called VK.com.
What is VK.Com?
VK, also known as Vkontakte, is a Russian-based social networking platform, created mostly for Russian users. It is one of the top websites globally (17th as of April 2018), and is owned by parent company Mail.ru. Though it’s not popular in the Philippines, it is popular in other parts of Europe.
So that you will know what it’s like, we tried opening a VK.com account to see what it is all about.
Welcome page
After turning on our VPN (for security reasons…), we put in VK.com in our web browser, and we were welcomed by this page. The language is English immediately. There is an option to signup via Facebook or Google accounts. We opted to join via a new account with new personal details (again, for security reasons…)
After inputting personal details, we were greeted by account validation via mobile – which is great – since there is less likelihood of creating spam/bot accounts. We inputted a number from a prepaid SIM.
Next, the activation code was sent to our mobile phone number indicated.
We inputted our password and voila – we were registered!
Additional details required were below:
Lastly, the next page required you to input where you studied. As not many Filipinos have a VK.com account, it was normal that there weren’t many choices for Universities yet.
Here’s the homepage after selecting the university (we selected “none” for now). The home page design looks very similar to Facebook, including the search bar, timeline, main menu. Even the color scheme and buttons look like they were copied from Facebook. This is not at all surprising, given that Facebook is considered still the number 1 social media platform, and it is much easier to copy an already tried and tested UI/UX (user interface and experience)
Tried searching for “Philippines” (since none of our friends were using VK ), and tags were not that many as of now.
Also tried looking at things to buy:
And that’s it! If you’re planning to open a VK.com account, don’t hesitate to ask us questions!