The new Ukrainian social network WEUA.info was launched early April as a part of the ongoing boycott of Russian goods and services.
The Russian
aggression against Ukraine stimulated an IT team from Lviv to develop a
Ukrainian social network as an alternative for the Russian-owned VKontakte or
Odnoklassniki – the two most popular social networks in Ukraine.
Bohdan
Oliyarchuk, one of the social network’s founders, says that his team asked
users to delete their pages in the Russian social networks leaving only the
message “We are Ukrainians. We are WEUA.info.”
Some
Ukrainians supported the initiative.
“I receive
dozens of letters from Ukrainian internet users every day,” Oliyarchuk adds.
“They say they quit the Russian networks and do not want to use them anymore.”
The network
is gaining popularity rather quickly. More than 64,000 people have become its
users since the beginning of April when it was launched. At night on April 1
during the first two hours 25,000 have registered and more than 400,000 people
have visited the social network website, according to Oliyarchuk.
“Our plan
is not just to set up a new social network. We want to create a platform that
will unite Ukrainians from all over the world and will become powerful
information weapon,” Oliyarchuk said.
Oliyarchuk
refused to say how much the project cost and where the developers got the
funding.
Internet
communications expert Maksym Savanevsky believes that there is no need in a
Ukrainian social network at all. He is certain that WEUA.info will not become
popular. It has “no prospects,” Savanevsky says.
Shortly
after the website was opened for public the developers experienced some strong
DDoS attacks so the website went down just several hours after its launch.
To register
in WEUA.info, one requires an invitation and electronic key which is a digital
code made to reduce the number of fake pages – these are the precautions the
website developers had to take due to ongoing hacker attacks.
“Now we get
more than 3,000 new users a day,” says Oliyarchuk. He promises to remove the
temporary necessary registration obstacles in the nearest future.
Oliyarchuk
suggests that the hacker attacks might originate from Russia as more than 70
percent of visits to the website come from people with Russian IP addresses.
“Russia is
afraid that our project can take away its informational influence over
Ukraine,” Oliyarchuk suggests.
Kyiv and
Ukraine’s western regions are the most active on WEUA.info.
WEUA.info
will have to compete for the audience with some other Ukrainian social
networks.
Druzi.org.ua,
which was launched on March 31 and has more than 2,000 registered users, is one
of them.
Ukraintci.org.ua,
launched in 2009, failed to gain popularity among Ukrainians despite setting
its aims as “to develop patriotic spirit, promote Ukrainian language, its
culture and history.”
Another
Ukrainian social network – Connect.ua – has Russian interface only. It is
popular mostly among Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Since 2007 when it was launched
its audience has reached more than 64 million users.
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Trach can be
reached at [email protected]
