NN.RU (nn.ru) is the leading city web portal of Nizhny Novgorod — one of the first city portals in Russia. I co-founded it in 1999 with Mikhail Iosilevich and wrote the code for the original site. I then spent about twelve years building it — as its first director and technical director — into the most-visited site in the region, a pioneer of social-networking and gamification features on the Russian web, before it was sold to Hearst Shkulev Media.
The NN.RU homepage in 2000 — news, classifieds, a city directory and forums on one regional portal.
A whole city on one site
NN.RU brought a whole city online in one place. From the start it combined local news (registered as a licensed electronic mass-media outlet), a busy city forum, classifieds for cars and real estate, a searchable business & web directory of Nizhny Novgorod, weather, a city map, and — added later — group buying. It was the first private Nizhny Novgorod portal licensed as electronic media, and one of the first Russian regional sites to build in social-networking and gamification.
Around the core portal grew a family of sub-projects — among them Avto NN (cars), the Nizhny Novgorod Rating, a city forum, “Anekdot NN”, the “Virtual Zoo”, SOFT-NN, even a self-teaching “Visual C++ / CGI” section — an entire local internet ecosystem under one roof.
Fourteen years of the homepage, captured from the Internet Archive — from the 1999 table layout to the modern portal.
Photos & ephemera courtesy of the nnov.ec city encyclopedia.
Co-founder · first director · technical director
I co-founded NN.RU with Mikhail Iosilevich and wrote the code for the original site. I was the company’s first director for about two years and then its technical director — leading the technology through twelve years of growth, from a two-person project to a business of 40+ people. Mikhail handled the visual design and commercial side; our first programmers were Alexey Pavlov and Andrey Shaposhnikov.
It grew the local internet too
From December 1999, NN.RU created and ran the annual “Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day” — a city-wide event and awards for the best local web projects, held every year through 2012. Beyond being a business, NN.RU helped grow the whole regional internet community: it was repeatedly ranked among the top and most-cited regional media and internet projects of Nizhny Novgorod.
NN.RU was the start of my internet, media and information work — the same path that later led to FedSP, Moskva.com, Numbuster, i2iStudy and other projects.
All my IT projects →