OK Release

TLDR:

SMAT is collecting content produced by groups and users on the Odnoklassniki (OK) social networking service. Since crawler deployment last week, we have collected ~20,000 posts and comments across ~5,000 groups and ~170,000 users. We are continually adding new users and groups to monitor. The data is immediately available via SMAT’s open public API.

Background

OK is owned by the Russian technology company, VK Company Limited, who also own a similar social networking site also called “VK”. At the time of writing the site itself has more than 200 million registered users and is the second most popular social network in Russia. We hope collecting data on OK will expand researcher insight into the social information space on the Internet in Russia. 

Brief Analysis

SMAT collection on OK in early April 2023. We first aggregated ~5,000 OK group URLs that appeared across SMAT’s existing collections and fed these into the crawler. The crawler then spiders across these groups by collecting posts, comments and group members. Thus far we have collected ~20,000 group posts and  ~170,000 users. Lastly, the crawler will grab all posts and comments made by the users - resulting in ~65,000 data points thus far. 

The crawler has various processes for collecting both live and historical data. As a result, the earliest post in our collected OK data is from 2008 and the latest is from today. As always, SMAT welcomes collection requests from our community - please get in touch!

You can access our docs on all our datasets, including OK, here: https://docs.smat-app.com/docs/guides/data-guide#ok

Conclusion

SMAT now collects select groups and profiles from the Odnoklassniki (OK) social networking service. The data is available via our public API. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to access more recent collections and/or would like to be part of the select archiving effort.