VK page for previous years. View before and now

At the dawn of the Internet, websites were made according to different principles. Since then, much has changed in design traditions and in the very concept of presenting information.

Marketers, designers, copywriters and business owners of various levels will probably be very curious to see what websites looked like 20 years ago. Of particular interest are those long-livers that are still popular today.

Apple

It’s no wonder that Apple has become famous for its thoughtful approach to design. The site from the end of the last century looks fresh and bright even by today's standards. Calm design and very clear structure with clear and useful information. Nothing superfluous, nothing random. It is logical that subsequent generations of designers took this concept of clean lines as a basis and continued to work in the same vein.

eBay

The creators of the resource were initially faced with the task of placing a lot of information on the main page at once. They did so - and as a result the site was very overloaded. Now, perhaps, the situation has improved, although the number of advertisements on the site has only increased. The colors have become calmer, and the structure has become more clear.

Facebook

Everyone knows that the creator of the most popular social network today, Mark Zuckerberg, likes the color blue. This is what was used from the very beginning. Today the design looks completely different, many new services have been added. One thing is alarming - sometimes designers greatly change the style of the site. For many people, getting used to changes is not so easy.

Gismeteo

Home page One of the first versions of the portal with weather information was visually difficult to perceive and was overloaded with unnecessary information. Today the site has become more beautiful, has acquired a multimillion-dollar audience and improved functions for searching for the necessary data.

Google

The search engine requires only one thing: a search bar and a bright logo. The concept of this site was built on this principle, and today its main page has remained virtually unchanged. From time to time, designers carefully change the fonts in the logo, but this does not in any way affect the popularity and recognition of the resource. An excellent example of how to release an initially high-quality product that is useful for users.

Kommersant

Bright colors, a simplified grid for placing links to materials, large font size - this is how the site looked before. Of course, it’s worth considering that monitors used to be different—accordingly, developers had to focus on this indicator. The current main page looks much more solid, and the nature of the information presentation looks more serious.

TVNZ

The style of the site almost completely replicates the format of a paper newspaper. This makes the resource recognizable and makes it easier to find the necessary materials. The philosophy of the beloved “Komsomolskaya Pravda” - presenting news in a certain way - was initially visible on the main site. Since then, not much has changed in the design itself, but services, of course, have increased.

WHO?WHAT?WHERE?

Initially, the portal was positioned as a collection of information about everything in the world, which was implied in the name itself. However, the design and structure in one of the first versions of the site did not allow combining dozens of sections. In 2017, the site design was completely redesigned: a clear division of headings and new services appeared, including “Marketplace”, “Names”, “Holidays”. From just a magazine, the site has turned into a multifunctional service, reflecting the updated editorial team’s ideas about what a modern glossy online project should look like.

Mail.ru

In the case of an initially simple and uncomplicated postal service it was quite difficult to imagine that we would get a powerful portal with many options and subservices. Since then, the site has changed beyond recognition, took one of the leading positions in the Russian-language segment in terms of the number of users and acquired a solid design.

Classmates

The main page of the social network has remained virtually unchanged, perhaps for the reason that not much time has passed since its creation. The original idea was to make it easy to search by school - and this function has remained to this day as a key function when registering on the resource.

RAEC website

The website of the Russian Association of Electronic Communications has existed for quite some time. From the very first surviving versions of the main page, it is clear that the site was made professionally, competently and intelligently. For example, a sample from seven years ago: solid, laconic, clear and stylish. Transparent mesh, coordinated design colors and a very pleasant visual range.

Rambler

This search engine was originally on English language. Full adaptation for Russian-speaking users was gradual - it took several years. Length search query in those days it was set manually: you first had to think and decide whether it would be short, medium or long.

RBC

Dollar and major stock exchange rates, main news from the country and the world and nothing extra. The business theme dictates certain rules for the design and placement of information on the main page - and they were followed from the very beginning.

RIA News

A news portal immediately assumes certain laws of the site structure: current headlines are displayed on the main page, the hottest news appears in a separate feed. Transparent, structured and clear. These principles have been followed since the creation of the resource and continue to dictate the concept of the site today.

In contact with

Initially, the popular social network on the Runet was created for communication between graduates of elite universities, as can be seen in the screensave of one of the early versions. Later, this approach was changed, but the design itself remained almost the same: calm, laconic and intuitive.

Yandex

The best search engine in Russia was immediately made transparent and clean: White background, a bright name. The magnifying glass was later removed, services were added: for example, just a few years after the creation of the resource, it was possible to read the news. Today it is one of the most visited portals with an extensive structure that is convenient and easy to use.

YouTube

A well-recognized logo, an intuitive grid of materials - again you can see an example of thoughtful design. The creators clearly understood from the very beginning what they were doing and why, creating a user-friendly structure. Not much has changed since then, probably because the mechanism for finding the right video itself has remained the same.

On October 10, 2006, the official launch of the VKontakte social network took place. What happened to the social network over 11 years? Let's remember now!

The hat is very cute. “VKontakte” then still appeared as a “closed directory of students and graduates of elite universities in Russia.” And one of Pavel Durov’s first blogs looked like this:

The site also announces the first competition to invite friends for very good prizes:

In 4 months, VKontakte gained over 50,000 users, a good start. We also managed to find a screenshot of one of the first counters of registered users. A very nice number on it, soon it will increase 10,000 times.

2007

year 2009

In 2009, VKontakte bought the Internet address vk.com - shorter and more convenient for promotion on the global market. The exact amount of the transaction is unknown, but it is clear that it was very large.

Interesting fact: in April 2009, twice as many people visited the VKontakte website than the Odnoklassniki website, their eternal competitor.

  • The “Ads” service is launched.

2010 #DurovTake Back the Wall

In February 2010, VKontakte registered its 60 millionth user, and in November the 100 millionth user. In October of the same year, an event occurred that caused a lot of noise: all user pages were switched to microblog mode, it was impossible to go back, and this caused outrage among many. People demanded the return of the familiar wall.

  • The wall turns into a microblog.
  • Added "Like" button.
  • The numeric id can be replaced with a “beautiful address”.

This is what the wall looked like before the microblog

2011.

At the beginning of 2011, the VKontakte website closed free registration in order to make it difficult to create fictitious users used for cheating and sending advertisements. It was possible to register only by invitation, which could be sent by one of the users (if he was given such an opportunity). Around the same time, the privacy settings changed: it became impossible to open your posts on the wall only to a certain circle of people, they became publicly available.

Free registration was reopened in July 2011.

  • Mobile applications for iPhone and Android are being launched.
  • Added the ability to chat with multiple participants.
  • Hashtags are being introduced.
  • Celebrity pages are starting to be verified.

First version mobile applications looked like this:

iPhone version

Android version

year 2012. Moving

In 2012, the VKontakte website finally moved to Domain name VK.

year 2013

In April 2013, it became known that the United Capital Partners investment fund managed by Ilya Shcherbovich (many believe to be close to the Kremlin) bought a 48% stake in VKontakte from Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev. They did not have the right to sell shares without first offering them to other VKontakte shareholders, including Pavel Durov, but they circumvented this restriction by selling not the shares, but the Cypriot companies that owned them. Pavel Durov said that this scheme “smacks of fraud.” The relationship between him and the new shareholder became aggravated from time to time and became public. There were rumors that the UCP Foundation wanted to remove Durov from the post of CEO.

At the same time, Durov devoted time to his new project - the mobile messenger Telegram (a communication application). The UCP Foundation was dissatisfied with this.

In the summer, before the “anti-piracy” law came into force, VKontakte removed a lot of music uploaded there illegally.

In 2013, according to Pavel Durov, the number of daily users of VKontakte grew by 14 million, reaching 56 million, and the growth of the audience of Odnoklassniki, its closest competitor, was twice as slow.

year 2014

2016

  • The news feed becomes “smart”, adapting to the interests of a specific user.
  • Launch of non-cash money transfers.
  • It becomes possible to conduct game broadcasts (streams).
  • The ability to send voice messages is being introduced.
  • VK completely changes its design full version site.

VK design after update in 2016

2017

  • VK now has the ability to record “Stories”.
  • A global update of VK mobile applications is taking place.
  • Limit listening to music in the background. Introduction of a paid monthly subscription.

VKontakte user pages, including your personal profile, often change under the influence of certain factors. In this regard, the topic of viewing the early appearance of the page becomes relevant, and for this it is necessary to use third-party tools.

First of all, it should be noted that viewing an early copy of a page, be it an active or already deleted user account, is possible only when the privacy settings do not limit the work search engines. Otherwise, third-party sites, including search engines themselves, cannot cache the data for later display.

Method 1: Google Search

The most well-known search engines, having access to certain VKontakte pages, are able to save a copy of the profile in their database. At the same time, the lifespan of the last copy is very limited, right up to the moment rescan profile.

Note: We will only affect Google search, but similar web services require the same steps.

  1. Use one of our instructions to find the user you need on Google.

  2. Among the results presented, find the one you need and click on the arrow icon located under the main link.

  3. From the drop-down list, select "Saved Copy".

  4. You will then be redirected to the person's page, which looks exactly like the last scan.

    Even if you have active VKontakte authorization in your browser, when viewing a saved copy you will anonymous user. If you try to log in, you will encounter an error or the system will automatically redirect you to the original site.

    You can only view the information that is loaded along with the page. That is, for example, you will not be able to view subscribers or photos, including due to the lack of authorization.

Using this method is not practical in cases where you need to find a saved copy of a very popular user's page. This is due to the fact that such accounts are often visited by third parties and therefore are much more actively updated by search engines.

Method 2: Internet Archive

Unlike search engines, a web archive does not impose requirements on the user page and its settings. However, not all pages are saved on this resource, but only those that were added to the database manually.

  1. After opening the resource from the link above, in the main text field, paste the full URL of the page you want to view a copy of.

  2. If the search is successful, you will be presented with a timeline with all saved copies in chronological order.

    Note: The less popular the profile owner is, the lower the number of copies found will be.

  3. Switch to the desired time zone by clicking on the appropriate year.

  4. Using the calendar, find the date you are interested in and hover your mouse over it. In this case, only highlighted ones are clickable. a certain color numbers.

  5. From the list "Snapshot" select right time by clicking on the link with it.

  6. Now you will be presented with a user page, but only in English.

    You can only view information that was not hidden by privacy settings at the time it was archived. Any buttons and other features of the site will be unavailable.

The main negative factor of this method is that any information on the page, with the exception of manually entered data, is presented in English. You can avoid this problem by using the following service.

Method 3: Web Archive

This site is a less popular analogue of the previous resource, but it copes with its task more than well. In addition, you can always use this web archive if the previously reviewed site is temporarily unavailable for some reason.

  1. Having opened the main page of the site, fill out the main search bar link to the profile and click the button "Find".

  2. After this, a field will appear under the search form "Results", where all found copies of the page will be presented.

  3. On the list "Other dates" Select the column with the desired year and click on the name of the month.

  4. Using the calendar, click on one of the numbers found.

  5. Once the download is complete, you will be presented with a user profile corresponding to the selected date.

  6. As in the previous method, all capabilities of the site, except for directly viewing information, will be blocked. However, this time the content is completely translated into Russian.

    Note: There are many similar services on the network, adapted for different languages.

You can also refer to another article on our website about the ability to view deleted pages. We are finishing this method and the article, since the material presented is more than enough to view early version VKontakte pages.

Since the birth of the Internet (more than 25 years ago), websites have undergone thousands of changes and their development has come a long way thanks to rapidly advancing technology. It’s already difficult to remember what websites looked like in the past, but the early versions of many well-known resources were completely different. Let's take a look at them.

View before and now

1. Google.com: started in 1996

Search engine Google system, founded in 1996 as a class project by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is today the largest company in the world. The first screenshot shows one of Google's earliest designs, while the second shows the modern design:

2. Facebook.com: started in 2004

8 years after Google, Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University. Known as TheFacebook, the project was initially available only to fellow Harvard students. Today, the attendance of this social network is 1.71 billion active users per month.


3. MySpace.com: started in 2003

Before Facebook came along, MySpace was a popular social networking site. It is one of the first social networks, but it has already been supplanted from its leading position by sites such as Twitter and Facebook. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for $580 million from founders Chris DeWulf and Tom Anderson. After MySpace began to rapidly lose its audience, Murdoch reportedly sold it for $35 million, calling the purchase a “huge mistake.”


4. Yahoo.com: started in 1994

In early 1994, Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang created a portal called Jerry's Guide to World Wide Web", which is a directory of other websites. Later that year the site was renamed Yahoo!.

There are several versions of the origin of this name. Some argue that Yahoo! is an acronym for the phrase "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". Others believe that the name was borrowed from the book “Gulliver’s Travels” by D. Swift, where the word “yahoo” refers to rude humanoid creatures. By the way, it is the second version that the company’s founders call the correct one.


5. YouTube.com: started in 2005


6. Wikipedia.org: started in 2001

The massive online encyclopedia Wikipedia has forever changed the way we obtain information for generations. And although Wikipedia has changed little in terms of appearance since its launch in 2001, during this time it has grown greatly: there are already more than 30 million articles on the site.


7. MSN.com: launched in 1995

MSN (Microsoft Network) was launched in 1995. In the early 2000s, MSN was the second most popular Internet service provider (after AOL LLC). The site msn.com itself is news portal with videos, promotions and surveys.


8. Apple.com: launched in 1997

The current look of the Apple site is radically different from its earlier version with the tempting offer of a free CD-ROM. However, even then the company demonstrated its love for the color white. And the Apple eMate 300, advertised on the right side of the page, was at one time a popular PDA (from 1997 to 1998).


9. Twitter.com: started in 2006

Twitter was launched in March 2006 and, compared to its old version, became almost unrecognizable. Twitter is currently one of the top ten most visited sites in the world and is considered one of the most successful startups of all time in terms of market capitalization.


10. eBay.com (formerly known as AuctionWeb): Launched in 1995

Who would have thought that this drab, unremarkable site would turn into the largest online auction site in the world? Its founder, programmer Pierre Omidyar, initially wanted to register the domain name EchoBay.com, but, as it turned out, one gold mining company already owned it, so it was decided to shorten the name to eBay.com.


11. LinkedIn.com: started in 2003

LinkedIn was created in 2003 by entrepreneur Reed Hoffman and was positioned as social network to search and establish business contacts. In the United States alone there are 93 million users of this network. From the very beginning, the site has a rather complex structure.


12. Amazon.com: launched in 1995

Initially, Amazon only sold books. When coming up with the name for his project, Jeff Bezos looked through the dictionary and settled on the word “Amazon”, since the Amazon is exotic, different and the largest river in the world. This is exactly what he wanted to make his store.

It is also interesting that earlier, in September 1994, Bezos acquired the domain Relentless.com and planned to call his brainchild the word Relentless (Russian. merciless, tireless), but his friends told him that such a name sounded a little sinister. The domain still belongs to Bezos - it redirects to Amazon.com.


13. Instagram.com: started in 2010

The now popular Instagram site began its existence under the name Burbn. The creators of the project, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, at some point realized that their service began to closely resemble Foursquare, and decided to make it more specialized, focusing on mobile photography. This is how Instagram was born. The name is a combination of two expressions - “ instant camera" And " telegram».

Since then, the project has been recognized as one of the most successful in the world. In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion.



All of the above resources today already have a completely different design, and you can find out what these sites looked like before only thanks to the preserved screenshots. But there are some sites that have been preserved in their original form! If one screenshot isn't enough for you and you want to have a real '90s-style surfing experience, take a look at the list below.

Work sites in the style of the 90s

At the time of publication of this article, all sites are working.

14. Space Jam: started in 1996

A funny piece of history: the Space Jam subsite of warnerbros.com, which has remained unchanged since its launch in 1996. Here you can follow the links and feel like you have traveled in time!


15. MillionDollarHomepage.com: launched in 2005

This site brought its creator, 21-year-old student from the UK Alex Tew, earnings of $1,037,100. The main page has a size of 1000 × 1000 = 1 million pixels. Each pixel was sold for $1, and the minimum purchase size was a 10x10 pixel block. The buyer had at his disposal the area that he bought - he could place a picture on it and make a link from it.

The goal of the site author was to sell all the pixels, therefore, the earnings should have been $1 million. But Alex Tew earned a little more, since he put the last thousand pixels on eBay auction, earning $38,100 on the sale. The site view has been saved for history and is available for viewing.


16. DPGraph.com: started in 1997

Website software for mathematical and physical 3D visualization. Not only is the subject matter striking here, but also appearance pages - animated gifs of volumetric graphs, painted in all the colors of the rainbow, and design in the style of the 90s - what could be more psychedelic?…


17. Aliweb.com: launched in 1993

ALIWEB (Archie Like Indexing for the WEB) - one of the first search engines in the world. Its launch took place in November 1993. Fortunately, 23 years later we have the opportunity to admire such a rarity in its untouched form.


18. Taco.com: launched in 1997

« We don't sell tacos. We don't make tacos. Truth be told, some of us don't even like them that much.", - said on one of the pages of the website taco.com, owned by a company that offers various computer help. The name TACO comes from the abbreviation T technical A dvisors Co mpany. This site from the 90s still shines thanks to the sense of humor of its system administrators.


19. IFindIt.com: started in 1995

I Find It is a huge guide to searching the Internet. Year of creation - 1995. The website contains advice: “ Please set your screen resolution to 800x600 for optimal viewing experience»…

Google, where were you in 1995? Apparently he was also playing with rattles.


20. Instanet.com: started in 1995

If HTML pages 2.0 (the version approved as a standard on September 22, 1995) could be sold at auction, then instanet.com would now be worth millions. Just take a look at this source code: