Odnoklassniki
Odnoklassniki (), abbreviated as OK or OK.ru, is a social network service used mainly in Russia and former Soviet Republics. The site was launched on March 4, 2006 by Albert Popkov and is currently owned by VK. The website currently has more than 200 million registered users and 45 million daily unique visitors. Odnoklassniki also currently has an Alexa Internet traffic ranking of 56 worldwide and 7 for Russia. Odnoklassniki is the second most popular social network in Russia, behind VK (VKontakte) but ahead of Facebook, which is in 3rd place. History Odnoklassniki was launched on March 26, 2006 by Albert Popkov, a telecommunications professional residing in London. Having previously been involved in similar projects in other European countries, Popkov initially developed Odnoklassniki as a hobby project from March to November 2006. During this period, it was only mentioned commercially within a friendly advertising agency as an advertising platform. However, due to a significant increase in userbase, Popkov established a separate legal entity for the service. By July 2007, Odnoklassniki had grown its audience to 4 million users. In February 2008, a British company called I-CD accused Popkov of Copyright infringement, alleging that he used proprietary information from his previous employment to create a site similar to Passado, a project 192.com he worked on until his resignation in November 2005. Popkov denied these allegations, but was eventually dismissed as managing director of Odnoklassniki. in November 2009, after the first day of trial in the Royal Courts of Justice, I-CD dropped all charges against Albert Popkov and Odnoklassniki after Albert Popkov and Odnoklassniki agreed to pay them an undisclosed amount in settlement. In September 2008, Popkov sold a controlling interest in Odnoklassniki to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), the owner of Mail.ru. DST and its subsidiary Forticom acquired a 58% stake in the network. Paid registration was introduced in Odnoklassniki in 2008, but this led to a decline in popularity as users began migrating to the main competitor, VKontakte. As a result, Odnoklassniki discontinued user registration fees in August 2009, reverting to a free model. As of a certain undisclosed date, Odnoklassniki had more than 45 million registered users, with 56% of the audience consisting of users aged 25–44. It was ranked fifth in terms of monthly reach among all Russian-language resources targeting internet users aged 14–55 in July 2009, according to TNS Web Index. Over the years, Odnoklassniki introduced various features and updates. These include the launch of a service in January 2009 that allowed users to clear their personal pages of unwanted guests, the introduction of beta testing for games in early April 2010, and the release of a beta version of video chat on December 24, 2010. The network also added several new sections and functions, such as the ability to divide friends into groups, single authorization for third-party sites, a music section for listening and uploading MP3 files, and the inclusion of links to various projects of the Mail.ru Group in the top panel of "Classmates." Odnoklassniki expanded