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What's happened?
Pavel Durov's team presented the online publishing service Telegraph. Platform users can create and post posts anonymously, without registration or authorization.
“Today we are launching Telegraph, a publishing tool that allows you to create impressive publications based on markdown (a lightweight text markup language for the web. - Esquire), with photos and all kinds of embedded elements,” the messenger’s official blog says.
As an example scenario for using the tool, the creators offered the following option: “With Telegraph, your Telegram channel can submit stories just like the media.” Is the service capable of taking on the mission of replacing or duplicating modern media? Let's answer this question.
How does Telegraph work?
Anyone can use the new publishing tool. The service is located at www.telegra.ph. When clicking on it, the user will find an almost empty white page with several lines. Each of them is signed, so it is impossible to get confused or confused in the algorithm of actions.
The topmost field was left for the title. By the way, it, along with the date of publication, will be displayed in the online address of the future post. For example: http://telegra.ph/This-line-for-title-12−03.
Below is the field that the developers left for the author's name. But since the service is declared anonymous, it is not necessary to enter personal data. If desired, you can specify any nickname.
The Telegraph authors created the third line for the main content of the publication: text, embedded components and links. For editing, the user has a fairly limited number of tools. The text can be bold or italic and enlarged. There are only two orientation options. By default, the material “tends” to the left edge. Center orientation is available as an option. But in this case the font and size change.
What does this give?
So far, Instant View only works with a few sites, including, for example, blog hosting Medium and the TechCrunch resource. It is the Instant View option that has taken on the role of a tool that should lock the audience into the messenger as closely as possible, cutting off the desire to go back to the original source of the publication.
But the creator can edit the finished content only if the cookies are saved. Once the browser cache is cleared, it will no longer be possible to change the content of the post. Just like trying to change something from another device. This is the price for anonymity.
Some media channels have an audience of up to one million people. At the same time, all Telegram channels collect four hundred million views daily. Pavel Durov shared these figures at the Mobile Congress in Barcelona in February. Then he added that the next step in the development of the messenger would be channels for the media and bloggers. They will provide direct access to the audience. In traditional social networks, achieving it has become much more difficult, since your voice is lost in news feeds, Durov is sure.
The emergence of Telegraph and Instant View is more of a natural development than a breakthrough. I agree with this and Head of Viber in Russia and CIS countries Evgeniy Roshchupkin. According to him, the current state of social networks is a consequence of user requests: “New media, which include instant messengers, are developing at incredible speed, transforming into full-fledged platforms for business and the end user. Already now, using the example of public accounts in Viber, we can say that brands, and especially the media, understand that this type of communication is a response to users’ requests. Within the framework of this functionality, it is possible not only to post news, but also to receive feedback from readers, who represent a very high-quality mobile audience. However, it is too early to talk about direct competition with the media: messengers are a promising, but additional and specific tool for generating content. And although we have examples of successful public accounts with an audience of more than a million subscribers, we understand that maintaining this level of content requires great professionals. Thus, in my opinion, messengers can be a good help for the media, but will not absorb them.”
The fact that the title of pioneer goes to Facebook also suggests that Telegram’s new features are not a breakthrough. Zuckerberg's brainchild was the first to launch Instant Articles, a feature comparable to Instant View. It has been integrating materials from the mobile versions of National Geographic, BuzzFeed, The New York Times and other publications into the social network without users going to their parent sites since April. And in test mode, the calculation began in 2015. Today, many social networks, including Russian ones, are working on a similar platform idea.
Will Telegraph and Telegram kill the media?
The expression “killer of anything” (product, service, industry) sounds at least vulgar. At most, this phrase devalues and discredits the very source of the threat. Remember those countless iPhone killers, Uber, which killed all taxi services. Such things rather change the market, introduce new rules, but do not suddenly make someone disappear.
Whether there are prerequisites for replacing the media with social networks and managers depends on the view of the concept of mass media, she said Vice President of Mail.Ru Group Anna Artamonova. “If by media we mean channels for information to reach people, then absolutely yes. If we mean a certain editorial office with people who have their own opinions, the range of topics they cover, and the policy for presenting the material, then no. Messengers and social networks strive to become a platform, not a unit of meaning. This is a broader and more correct strategy. The idea is to give anyone a platform to convey information, but not express their position in doing so. Messengers and social networks will definitely not maintain their own editorial staff, which will produce content: write texts, film stories, and the like.
In addition, there are two factors. The first is legislation. Now the media, especially in Russia, are quite strictly regulated in the legal field. And someone should be responsible for some opinion or information. And secondly, the ability and desire to write texts and create any content is not the destiny of many people.”
Classic media will not disappear, or rather, those who will be able to transform their business model will survive, believes Executive Director of the Institute for Applied Data Analysis at Deloitte Alexey Minin: “Why does the future belong to Google, Amazon, Facebook and other IT companies? Because they, essentially becoming marketplaces, demonetize the brand of those organizations that provide them with services. The media will need to abandon the traditional model of offering information. People don't want to look for her anymore. It is much more convenient for them to have some kind of media aggregator, where they can receive relevant information upon request to a chatbot or in some other way. That is, the media become a source of products that will be supplied to a single platform for communication with clients.
In general, the main point of a marketplace is that it knows everything about its users. For example, at what time and with what frequency do they read certain news. And the task of such aggregators is to cut off the media from clients, because it is precisely these clients that they will subsequently sell. Similar transformations of business models are already taking place in the banking sector and in retail (especially in electronics retail). In the near future, changes will affect the print media, and then the entire media sphere.”
In other words, we now see that the media, as best they can and as best they can, are mastering social networks, learning to export and even reproduce content on an ongoing basis on new platforms.
While social networks and instant messengers are not a threat to the media, and Telegraph is a completely unsuccessful product, he said Head of the Community Laboratory Vladislav Titov: “If Durov’s first two startups were successful (VKontakte and Telegram), then as for Telegraph there are big questions. Anonymity of authorship can be widely used by extremist informal organizations. They can agree to receive conditionally coded messages with seemingly meaningless text at a certain time. And those who need it will read these messages. If WhatsApp, Viber and Facebook Messenger are quite loyal to all intelligence services in all countries and actively fight against illegal elements, then Pavel Durov insists that Telegram is free from this. And Telegraph has an even wider field; you don’t even need to register there. And I very much doubt that this service will be of interest to ordinary users.”
According to the Statista resource, by September of this year Telegram had been installed by 100 million users. At the same time, according to Similarweb research, Telegram was in 21st place among the most popular social networks in the world.
They say that it is bad to count other people's money. But how can one not do this when we are talking about a genius businessman who, at the age of 32, made it into the top 100 richest businessmen in Russia? So today we'll count Pavel Durov's condition- one of the most famous dollar millionaires in Russia and the creator of Telegram.
Durov's first money
It is interesting that Durov never worked anywhere on a permanent basis. At the same time, he does not consider VKontakte and Telegram to be work. As Pavel admitted in an interview, this is too interesting to call it work.
During his student days, Durov worked as a freelancer: he created websites, wrote articles, and organized events. In addition, he won large grants several times: scholarships from the President of Russia, the Government of Russia, Vladimir Potanin.
Today's millionaire during his student days (pictured left). While still a student, Durov developed several programs to improve the social life of the university. For example, he created the electronic library Durov.com with university coursework. Another of his projects, the student forum Spbgu.ru, became the prototype of the VKontakte social network.
Later, Durov realized that forums where everyone hides behind nicknames have no future. He came up with the idea of creating a resource where people would use real names and photographs and add information about themselves. The project was called “Student.ru”, later it was renamed “VKontakte” so that graduates could also use the service. Thus began Durov’s path to a multimillion-dollar fortune.
At the start of his career, he had no initial capital other than his ambitions and ideas. Durov's salary on VKontakte
During the existence of VKontakte, Durov’s payment increased 218 times. He received his first salary - a little more than 26 thousand rubles - at the beginning of 2007 as general director. After the probationary period, Durov’s salary increased to 115 thousand rubles, and in 2008 it was increased to 345 thousand. In 2013, Durov already received 5.76 million rubles.
In public, Durov maintains the image of a wealthy man. In 2014, Russian media published news about an inspection carried out at the request of shareholders on VKontakte. It was reported that Durov in 2012-2013. spent about 273 million rubles from the company budget for personal needs. It also turned out that Durov set his own salary and wrote out multi-million dollar bonuses every month. It was clarified that during the year he wrote out 8 bonuses for himself in the amount of about 28 million rubles.
Pavel speaks at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference Later, VKontakte executive director Dmitry Sergeev denied this information. According to him, Durov did not set his own salary, and his salaries grew in proportion to the development of the company.
Durov's first billion
In 2011, Durov became a ruble billionaire - then his fortune was estimated at 8 billion rubles. By that time, he occupied 350th place in the list of the richest people in Russia. From that moment on, Pavel began to constantly appear on Forbes lists, including the magazine calling him the best startuper on the Runet.
Lately, expensive suits are not uncommon in his wardrobe. In the same year, the idea of the Telegram messenger was born. When the special forces came to Pavel’s door, he wrote to his brother Nikolai. At that moment, Durov realized that he needed a resource for safe communication with loved ones.
The first version of Telegram was released in 2013. In three years, the messenger managed to gather an audience of 100 million people, and it continues to grow.
Sale and dismissal from VKontakte
In January 2014, Durov sold his stake in VKontakte to Ivan Tavrin, CEO of Megafon. According to experts, he received for his 12% from 360 to 480 million dollars.
The founder of the social network explained that his share did not allow him to influence the board of directors, but thanks to the sale, Pavel will be able to develop Telegram without third-party investors. At the same time, Durov assured that he would remain working in the company as general director and would continue to develop VKontakte.
However, four months after the sale, in April 2014, Durov resigned from the company and emigrated from Russia. He paid $250,000 to the Sugar Fund of the Caribbean country of St. Kitts and Nevis and automatically received citizenship of that country. This gave him visa-free access to 124 countries, including Schengen countries, the UK, Singapore and Brazil.
Durov and charity
Durov spares no money for charity. So, in 2011, he founded the Start Fellows fund, which supports startups. In 2012, he donated $1 million to Wikipedia and $60 thousand to the winners of the Open World Teen Programming Championship.
Pavel’s last charitable act was an offer for developers of the best chatbots on Telegram. Durov promised from 25 thousand dollars to each author. The total amount was about a million dollars.
The billionaire does not hide the fact that he lives in grand style, but he spends money not only on pleasure. Current condition of Pavel Durov
In May 2015, VKontakte bought ICVA Ltd, which owned the main data center of the social network, from Durov. Most of the information about VK users is stored there. So Durov replenished his fortune by another 909 million rubles.
In 2016, the founder of Telegram took 135th place in the Forbes ranking, rising to 100th place within a year. By 2017, Durov’s fortune grew from 600 to 950 million dollars, that is, he now owns almost 60 billion rubles. Another hundred million and Durov will become a dollar billionaire.
Durov's main asset is Telegram, and it shows good growth year after year. For the first two years, Durov paid all expenses from his own pocket. In the summer of 2015, he said that he spends $1 million a month on the messenger. According to Pavel, several companies offered to finance the project, but he prefers to spend his own funds on development.
Speech at the presentation of the Telegram messenger In the summer of 2015, Telegram launched an open platform for creating bots that can interact with external services and applications. In the spring of 2017, Telegram got its own. You can pay via Apple Pay or Android Pay. What is important is that Telegram does not take a commission for payments: bot developers take the entire income.
So Durov is introducing his own business model, which is not focused on maximum profit - unlike most commercial projects. The creator of the messenger said that the Telegram team plans to earn exactly the amount that will be needed for equipment, transportation and salaries for “the best developers in the world.” When it will start bringing in that kind of money remains in question.
Analysts estimate the messenger at $1 billion - that's exactly how much Google was willing to pay. Durov himself named the amount at 3-4 billion dollars, citing recent proposals for sale. However, he is not going to sell his brainchild.
At the beginning of 2018, Telegram finally began to monetize thanks to the launch of an ICO and the release of its own. As a result of the Pre-Sale, $1.5 billion of investments were attracted, even before the official start of the ICO itself. The release of the Gram currency will make Telegram a profitable project. All relevant information about the development of Durov’s blockchain system is published in the channel
Telegram creator Pavel Durov agreed to include the messenger in the register of information distributors in Russia after the head of Roskomnadzor Alexander Zharov said that only registration data is required from him, while “there is no talk of having access to users’ correspondence ".
Prior to this, Durov did not want to register Telegram in Russia, citing, among other things, Article 23 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation (everyone has the right to privacy of correspondence, telephone conversations, postal, telegraph and other messages), and the Russian authorities blocked the messenger for Russian users.
“The head of Roskomnadzor denied the desire to gain access to the personal correspondence of Telegram users and stated that all he expects from us to comply with the law is to provide information about the Telegram company:“There is no question that there will be access to users’ correspondence. There is only one question – about the five identifiers that the messenger must report to Roskomnadzor; they will be officially entered into the information dissemination register. That’s the point” (A. Zharov)
Registration data about the Telegram publishing company is not a secret and is available to anyone in open sources https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/OC391410 Email address [email protected], where our team receives complaints about content related to terrorist propaganda, is also public and known to Roskomnadzor.
If the regulator’s desires are really limited to this, I have no objection to using this data to register Telegram Messenger LLP in the register of information dissemination organizers, however, we will not comply with the unconstitutional and technically unrealizable “Yarovaya Law” - as well as other laws that are incompatible with privacy protection and Telegram privacy policy.
In other words, by agreeing to be included in the register, we proceed from the truth of the statement of the head of Roskomnadzor (“that’s the point”) and do not undertake any additional obligations. As part of our work with the Russian regulator, we can promise only the level of cooperation that we demonstrate in all other countries, namely, to continue working together to remove public materials related to the promotion of terrorism, drugs, calls for violence and child pornography, and also to continue working to prevent spam mailings.
“I can’t predict how this statement will affect the position of the regulator, but I am sure of one thing: if Telegram is really blocked in Russia, it will not happen because we refused to provide data about our company.”
June 28, 18:33 The head of Roskomnadzor Zharov said that in the near future Telegram will be included in the register of information distributors in Russia.
“At this stage, the Telegram messenger has provided all the data required by law for inclusion in the register of organizers of information dissemination. In the near future, the messenger will be included in this register.Thus, Telegram began to work in the legal framework of the Russian Federation. I am sure that other international communication services should do the same. As for Russian laws, they are mandatory for all companies operating in Russian jurisdiction."
The creators of Telegram have launched a new service, Telegraph, a platform for publishing texts. The peculiarity of the service is that it works without an account, just go to the site and start typing texts. Publications support attachments: photos, videos, tweets, YouTube or Vimeo videos.
This is what the telegraph looked like
Why this service? It's called a publishing tool, but there's one limitation. It will not be possible to create directories from publications; each post receives a unique address on the telegra domain. pH. The address of the material consists of its title and date of publication. It is not yet very clear whether entries can be edited; most likely, this only works on the computer where it was created.
In Telegram, links appear in preview mode (Instant View), the contents of pages are visible without waiting for them to load, this is convenient. The Instant View feature itself has appeared in the new version of Telegram, so update the application.
P.S. Each post receives a serial number at the end of the address, you can see the work of other people by selecting the numbers. It’s not very safe, so it’s better not to post trade secrets in Telegraph, they might get stolen.
Pavel Durov's company Digital Fortress, registered in the USA, released the Telegram messenger this week. The application, which is currently only available for the iOS operating system, has already caused a lot of noise, and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum even accused Durov of blindly copying someone else’s product. Durov, in turn, calls Telegram in its current form an intermediate experimental product, which will change and at the moment, rather, is necessary to test the operation of the ultra-secure MTProto protocol, developed by Durov’s brother Nikolai. The founder of VKontakte names four differences between Telegram and WhatsApp: security, message transmission speed, cloud storage with synchronization between devices, and the ability to add a significant number of functions. In addition, according to Durov, his application “is free and will always be so.” WhatsApp charges one dollar per year for use.
But how significant are these differences for the user? To answer this question, Forbes compared the work of WhatsApp and Telegram.
Settings/profile
Both services allow you to separately configure notifications for messages and group chats, both offer to set the background for the conversation window (from the suggested pictures or your own photo), and both offer to automatically save received photos to the phone’s memory.
There are differences, and they are usually not in favor of Telegram. Durov's product currently does not allow you to import your photo from Facebook or send the history of any dialogue by mail. It is worth remembering, however, that this is the first public version of Telegram, while WhatsApp Inc. was founded back in 2009.
Messages
The dialog windows are surprisingly similar in appearance. Both applications have a customizable background and double green checkmarks to confirm the read status of a message. The functionality is also the same: any message can be copied, deleted and forwarded. In both WhatsApp and Telegram, you can send not only text messages, but also photos, videos, and also indicate your location.
The most noticeable difference is in speed: text messages arrive almost instantly in both cases, but Telegram has a slight advantage when attaching photos. Especially when working with slow mobile Internet. Although this may be due to less load on the service: WhatsApp now has 300 million active users.
Multi-user chats
The differences between the two applications are especially pronounced when working in chats. If WhatsApp limits the maximum number of participants in one conversation to 50 users, then Telegram can have up to 100 people in one chat. The mechanism for adding people to the chat is also different. For WhatsApp, only the creator of the chat can add newcomers; for Telegram, all its participants can add newcomers.
Chats cope with heavy loads in different ways. We gave both services a kind of “crash test”: about ten people sent as many short messages and photos as possible within a minute. An iPhone 4 with WhatsApp chat open during the “crash test” completely stopped delivering messages, did not respond to pressing the on-screen buttons and only vibrated, notifying about new messages. In Telegram, the same iPhone, under similar loads, delivered messages with some delay, but unlike its competitor, it retained its functionality and still allowed you to read and write messages, view photos, and download them.
Attaching a photo
Another noticeable difference is the interface for attaching images. In WhatsApp, you can only select photos one by one, looking at their preview versions. In Telegram, in the preview version, you can click to expand a photo to full screen before selecting, and special checkboxes allow you to select several photos at once. Additionally, swiping across the previews will mark all the ones the user touched.
Unique opportunities
Telegram has a built-in function for searching images on the Internet: if in a conversation you want to convey your emotions not in words, but, for example, in a frame with a pleading cat from “Shrek,” you can do this in a few seconds by entering the appropriate request. The Bing service is used for searching; in WhatsApp, you can add photos only from those available on your smartphone, but in addition to text messages, you can also send voice messages.
