Moikrug

2005 - 2019

dead europe

moikrug, "my circle", was russia's professional network, a place to map your work contacts by degrees the way linkedin did, connections of connections. it went live on 18 november 2005 and yandex bought it in march 2007, running it as its own corner of the russian social web. ownership passed to the thematic media group in 2015. at the end of 2019 the name was retired and the whole thing was folded into habr career, where the professional graph still runs under a different brand.

» see moikrug.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

moikrug was russia-only at the layer that decides these things, the language. it ran in russian, for the russian-speaking professional web, and that web sat behind cyrillic and a border i never had a reason to cross. in 2007 i was a computer engineering student in ankara. linkedin barely meant anything to me yet, and a russian version of it meant less. to be honest.

moikrug, which translates to "my circle", went live on 18 november 2005 as a way to map your professional contacts by degrees, the same idea linkedin was building, where you could see the connections of your connections. back then. yandex bought moikrug.ru in march 2007 and ran it for years as part of the russian social stack.

for a stretch it did the job these networks are supposed to do. you found old colleagues, and work moved through the graph of who knew who. russia in those years had a full set of its own social products, vkontakte and odnoklassniki among them, and the western names mostly never got a foothold there.

~ the case file ~

Born	18 november 2005, russian professional social network
Peak	a leading russian professional-contact network through the late 2000s
Killed	december 2019, retired and renamed habr career
Lifespan	about fourteen years
Made by	an independent 2005 startup, then yandex from 2007
Killed by	a rebrand into habr career, not a shutdown so much as a name change

~ how it landed ~

the pitch was the professional graph, drawn for a labor market that ran on personal introductions anyway. in those days. moikrug just put that offline habit onto a web page, so a recruiter or an old boss was a couple of clicks away instead of a phone call you had to work up to.

~ what really happened ~

ownership moved off yandex on 8 june 2015 to the thematic media group, the people behind habr, russia's big tech-community site. they ran moikrug alongside it for a few more years. then at the end of 2019 the moikrug name was retired for good and the service was pulled into habr career.

~ what replaced it ~

career.habr.com is still up, still matching russian engineers to jobs. so moikrug did not really die, it changed names. it flipped over somewhere in december 2019. the brand went into the ground and the graph underneath it kept working, which is a quieter ending than most of the graves here get.

~ leave a rose ~

an anonymous tribute. one rose per visitor per day.

@}-->-- ... roses left here

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

~ leave a wreath ~

a rose fades by morning. a wreath stays on this grave for good, with your name on it.

paid once through stripe. payments are handled by OÜ Lakeview, the small company that keeps rip.so running. the money pays for the hosting and the nightly digging. adopt it and the headstone reads "maintained in memory by" you. the groundskeeper plants new wreaths at the next tending, usually within a day.

» one email a week: new graves and the anniversaries of the dead. subscribe

~ leave a note ~

visitors before you have left these graveside notes. anonymous welcome.

other social networks: Trusera, Qruiser, NetEase Weibo, Tencent Weibo

also died in 2015-2019: GPSies.com, iG (Internet Group), Agnitum Outpost Firewall

« back to the graveyard · search · wander by decade

« previous · random · next »