While Twitter is gaining traction among the connected Russian elite, Mail.ru Group, the Russian LSE-listed Internet group, announced on Monday the launch of Futubra, a remarkably designed microblogging service.
Although some observers have nicknamed it “the Russian Twitter,” Futubra seems closer to Tumblr in terms of functions, with its focus on multimedia content sharing and immediate access to all users’ content. But Futubra distinguishes itself with more advanced news group and comment functions.
“While developing Futubra, we aimed to offer what we feel is lacking in existing microblogging services and social networks,” explains Anna Artamonova, Mail.ru Group’s Vice President for Strategic Projects. “On the one hand, it has beautiful and bright content representations, on the other, there are no limitations on accessing information from interesting people. As a result, we’ve created a service that falls in between social networking and media, providing users with the possibility of reading news feeds from one another.”
Although it does not hide its strong ambitions for Futubra, Mail.ru Group acknowledges that the project is still in an experimental stage. The company has not set yet any precise traffic or revenue targets for Futubra.
Mail.ru Group, however, is already considering international expansion for Futubra. “The service was designed with a multilingual perspective from the very beginning. We don’t have any precise roadmap for other countries yet, but our primary area of interest includes Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states. Furthermore, we may introduce Futubra in other European and Asian countries,” said project head Alexey Terekhov in an exchange with East-West Digital News.
After just six months, Futubra, the first project of Mail.ru Group’s new in-house project incubator, now has a dedicated team of 20 employees. But the group declined to comment on the cost of the project.
Last July, Twitter, which launched its Russian version less than a year ago, had reached one million Russian users. Tumblr also has a Russian version, but it is used by approximately 10,000 Russians, CNews.ru quoted Mail.ru Group General Manager Dmitry Grishin as saying, out of almost 40 million world wide.
