This article was published on December 21, 2012

Mail.Ru shuts down Futubra, its Twitter rival for Russian-speaking users, after just 11 months


Mail.Ru shuts down Futubra, its Twitter rival for Russian-speaking users, after just 11 months

Russian microblogging service Futubra is officially closing, according to the farewell statement published on its website.

Launched in January 2012 by Russian Internet giant Mail.Ru Group, a Twitter clone for Russian-speaking users, Futubra didn’t make to its first birthday.

Here’s a translation of the farewell note published on Futubra’s website:

Friends!

Every day since its launch we were improving and developing Futubra. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough for sustained growth of the project. That’s why we have made a decision to close the project.

For us, it was a big experiment, and the knowledge that we gained while working on it is very valuable. Our team moves on to new projects, which you will hear about in the future.

Thanks for everyone who’s been with is.

Yours, Futubra team.

Having a Twitter-like timeline with endless scrolling, Futubra was positioning itself as a multimedia microblogging platform. Initially one could think that the service had a chance at attracting Russian-speaking users, as many of them still prefer local products to their global counterparts. Examples include the Yandex online search engine and the Vkontakte social network, which have firm top positions in their respective categories in Russia.

However, the reality proved to be different. First signs of shutdown of the project coming soon could have been seen in an interview that Dmitriy Grishin, Chairman and CEO of Mail.ru Group, gave Roem in October. Back then he said that “for us it was an experiment, and undoubtedly it was an interesting one,” but “everything went differently than planned” and “the project wasn’t as successful as we expected it to be.”

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At the time of writing, users can still login to Futubra to read their timelines. There’s no information on when the website will be shut down completely.

Image credit: Kecko / Flickr.

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