Will an FB center appear in Ukraine?

On Tuesday The Day published an article about the visit of the creator of the world-known social network Facebook Mark Zuckerberg to Russia. The question when Ukrainians will have a possibility to welcome the IT-genius in our country remains open. IT-observer Oleksii KHARCHENKO answered this question in his exclusive commentary to The Day.

Oleksii KHARCHENKO, IT-observer:

“A lot of Ukrainians use Vkontakte [InTouch. – Ed.] because of musical and video content and loyalty to the domestic product and not foreign one. However, the Ukrainian Facebook users are more active. They more actively participate in discussions, like webpages of brands and share interesting information, whereas Vkontakte users only look through the news line. The social network Moi Mir [My World. – Ed.] has quite good positions in Russia but it did not take root in Ukraine. I think because Russian-language Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki [Classmates. – Ed.] are enough for the Ukrainian audience, they do not see any sense in having the third social network.

“As for e-mail services, the time when we opened browser page and could see only the yellow search bar of Yandex or Rambler has passed. Users have the right to choose. The main roles are played by really handy e-mail services offering large functionality and good protection from nasty spam. Besides, if users e-mail their foreign friends, domain .ru is taken worse than .com.

“For Zuckerberg Russia, as well as China, is a strategic market, especially, taking into account that his main competitor Pavel Durov with his social network Vkontakte is working there. Some Russian people jokingly or seriously analogize Facebook with capitalism as they associate this social network with the US.

“I think Zuckerberg came to get in touch with the Russian audience. When should we expect him in Ukraine? When the Ukrainian audience has real weight in this social network and we are able to offer Zuckerberg something he would not be able to refuse.”