If you're interested: Russia is missing because we've got one very similar social network[1][2] that's got arguably more features and arrived to the market a year or so earlier than facebook got its russian localization.
[1] http://vk.com
[1] http://vk.com
To quote StudiVZ CEO Riedl: “There is now no more direct battle against the global player Facebook.” [3]
It’s interesting to see that the Facebook clone worked in Russia but didn’t in other places.
[1] StudiVZ: http://www.studivz.net/
[2] StudiVZ was founded in November 2005 (a whole year earlier than Vkontakte), Facebook was localized in early 2008
[3] A week ago, in an interview (German): http://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/studivz-ch...
1. vk ports features from fb 3 to 6 months after they appear (share-widget, like-widget, connect-widget, possible friends)
2. vk's got a comprehensive search engine with lots of filters by age, city, gender, current status (married, single, in active search etc.). Lots of people I know use vk for dating. I might be missing something, but I didn't find such a thing for facebook.
3. vk's got native music and video upload. By native I mean that you don't use any third party application/service to do this. Everything's hosted on vk's servers. That's the reason copyright owners sued vk several times (RIAA even blacklisted the guys). However, they [copyright holders] lost in all the court cases.
4. VK offers cheap contextual ads. While not exactly a killer feature, it is very nifty for business, -- they only charge per-click and if you get the targeting and ad text right, you'll get more visitors than you need.
5. Another random guess is that it's easier for a German than for a Russian to migrate to English service.
So if you have all your friend on VK AND you have all the entertainment stuff there - why switch? Unless Facebook comes with some interesting strategies to pull the users, the status quo will remain as is. And from what I hear and see, FB is putting a significant effort into this. It'll be interesting to watch in the nearest 1-2 years.
In principle, Facebook is localised. I could imagine that few apps are translated to German though, and even fewer to Russian, except those built by native developers; (I don't use any apps, so I don't know) that native developer pool ought to be the same as the one building VK (or VZ) apps. Assuming Facebook does a decent job of filtering localised apps, I can't imagine this to be a massive issue for users.
I can only assume the media upload is what keeps people coming back.
All of the other reasons you mention seem to be reasons why businesses would prefer VK over Facebook, but surely it's the users that are the key?
People keep coming back because that's where their friends are.
This tells me that even if a social network seems to have a particular market cornered, a competitor still has a chance. (Which, I think, is quite nice to know.) Network effects are obviously important and have to be considered by anyone who wants to build a social network but I think there are certain properties of social networks that dampen network effects: Signing up is easy and free, for one, and rebuilding the social graph, while some work, is far from tedious. You only have to add some friends and recommendations get you the rest of the way.
I guess that this is not the case with vk.com and they may as well survive.
The other great thing is the lack of censorship. Vkontakte doesn't censor posts and doesn't have Facebook's policy of selectively banning links to outside websites.
You can't post a picture of a titty on your FB wall without the Facebook Nazis coming down with threats on you. Vkontakte doesn't ban adult content or adult-related groups.
The two things they do actively fight against are spammers and pedophiles.
About respecting copyright law, Facebook does nothing about people posting stolen photographs. It's just more socially acceptable to pirate those.
The other thing about Vkontakte is it's very popular with CIS diaspora and exchange student communities abroad. Lots of people keep accounts in both Facebook and Vkontakte, but the latter gets used more for things like organizing social outings and events.
Except that it's an incomplete relatively ugly clone of Facebook, which is why quite a few people are jumping ship to Facebook. It does have its niceties in the form of music uploads, but that's more of a quirk of the general state of regard for copyright laws in the country.
Give it another year or two.