Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian Internet giant, is testing a social service called ‘Yandex.Aura’ (see presentation page). The news was confirmed by Yandex to East-West Digital News after being commented abundantly in Russian media and social networks. However, the company did not specify the planned date of Aura’s public release.
Currently, Aura is in beta testing phase, accessible on invitation only. Designed as part of the Yandex app offer for smartphone users, the service uses artificial intelligence to suggest people to connect with and communities to join based on user interests. In other words, it suggests “friends” who have similar interests, keeps you in touch with like-minded people as well as those who live close by.
Users may parametrize the visibility of their posts: these may appear in the newsfeeds of people of a certain age and gender or living in the same city or town.
To make this happen, Aura relies on geolocation data from devices, and uses the capabilities of neural networks and other Yandex services.
There are no likes; instead, there is a Tinder-style swiping feature: if you like a post, you can swipe it right, if you don’t like it, you swipe left.
Previous incursions
Initially designed an Internet search service, Yandex and its subsidiaries now operate in a variety of fields – including news aggregation, mapping services, a voice assistant, a taxi business, self-driving vehicles, e-payments and e-commerce, to name a few.
Aura is not the company’s first incursion in the social media field: its services Yandex.Zen and Yandex.Local (Yandex.Rayon) are rather popular. However, they stand far behind VK (Vkontakte) and OK (Odnoklassniki), the leading social networks in Russia and neighboring countries owned by Yandex’s archrival Mail.Ru Group.
Another social service, ‘Ya.ru,’ was launched in 2007, and grew up to be one of Russia’s largest blogging platforms. However, the service shut down in 2014, having failed to attract a sufficient number of users.
The Aura project does not necessarily indicate that Yandex intends to compete directly with VK, OK or Facebook. Rather, it looks like an attempt to create a specific online social space.
According to community management expert Vlad Titov, Yandex seeks to appeal to those who got tired of cluttered friends’ newsfeed.
“Since last year, Yandex has been analyzing what is missing and which needs are not met by existing social networks. There are tons of unwanted ads there, while the newsfeed features may look strange. Aura is an answer to these weaknesses. Thus, Yandex is trying to create a space based on true user interests,” Titov said in an exchange with business daily Kommersant.
“If they will do things in the right way, Yandex may improve social search mechanisms using neural networks. This is much more interesting than competing with those who have been on the market for a dozen of years,” believes social network expert Nikolay Kazantsev.
Last month, Yandex topped the Forbes list of the 20 most valuable Russian Internet companies, while Mail.Ru Group ranked second.
