20 facts about Telegram

Figures on the number of Telegram users, who is behind its team and what new features are being prepared

Desperate to talk with Telegram representatives about the growth and prospects of the service, TJournal decided to look for information in open sources. It turned out that the creators of Telegram are constantly discussing the development of the project publicly - including future functions - but few people notice this.

TJournal has put together all the available facts about Pavel Durov’s messenger: how many people use it, who is behind the project and where the company’s headquarters are located.

1. Nobody managed to decrypt Telegram traffic

The traffic decryption competition, for the successful solution of which Durov promised 200 thousand dollars in bitcoins, ended without winners . Telegram representatives said that they have no choice but to restart the competition, increasing the amount of the reward, but this time they will provide tools not only for intercepting traffic, but also for modifying it.

Thus, Telegram was able to attract the attention of the largest security experts from around the world for free, receive their valuable comments and advice, and then make corrections to the work of its own service.

Telegram promised to pay a Russian programmer from Habrakhabr who discovered a potential vulnerability in the MtProto encryption algorithm 100 thousand dollars . to pay another programmer who found a vulnerability in one of the Android clients The company also promised a reward, but did not specify its amount.

2. Telegram code is open

The source code of existing Telegram clients (for Android, iOS and Linux command line) is open source and free to download and study. It is licensed under the GNU GPL 2.0, which gives anyone the freedom to study, modify and use it - including for commercial purposes.

However, large corporations may encounter problems when implementing the MtProto data transfer protocol, developed by Nikolai Durov and used in Telegram: it is prohibited from being used in companies where revenue is distributed not only among team members, but also among shareholders.

3. Voice messages, stealth mode and possibly calls will appear

Audio messages will soon appear on Telegram. In the FAQ , Telegram representatives mention that they “love the idea of ​​fast and secure voice notes and calls.” For now, the service offers to transfer mp3 files by attaching documents. Meanwhile, WhatsApp is going to introduce a voice calling feature in 2014.

But there will be no WhatsApp-like statuses in Telegram, but an invisibility mode will appear - when the user communicates in the application, but is not displayed online.

4. There are Russian developers in the Telegram team

As explained in the FAQ, there are two main figures behind the creation of the project - the brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov. Pavel helps the project financially and ideologically: at the start, he made a “generous donation” through the Digital Fortress foundation, thanks to which Telegram exists comfortably and still does not attract any other material resources. Nikolay is the creator of the MtProto data transfer protocol, the technological base that makes Telegram so fast.

There are several key developers from Russia on the team, but their names are not mentioned anywhere. At the same time, Durov said that the developers deserve more glory: “My responsibility is to support the team behind Telegram.”

According to Pavel Durov’s close friend and former deputy general director of VKontakte Ilya Perekopsky, Pavel took “15 of the best Olympiad programmers” from the company to work on Telegram, but did not specify who exactly. Durov himself commented on this statement, but did not refute it. ( Updated : after the publication of the material, Durov still denied these statements)

Well-known VKontakte developer Igor Zhukov was developing an “unofficial” Telegram web client. According to Pavel Durov, Zhukov has not been an employee of VKontakte since May 2012, but for a year he supported the social network services he developed for free.

5. Telegram is not for sale

Many users suggest that in the wake of the growing popularity of the project, large companies like Google may be interested in it. Telegram is not for sale - even if Google wants to buy it - and it is impossible to invest in it.

Although the project does not yet require additional external funding, in the future it plans to work on a donation model, which is generally typical for open source software. If donations don't cover the cost of the app, it may add "optional" paid features, but which ones are not yet known. Telegram is confident that the donation model will work .

6. Telegram is not on Facebook

Unlike most international projects, Telegram does not have its own Facebook page. Project news on VKontakte appears on the “ Durov’s MTProto Challenge ” page.

But the project has an active microblog on Twitter (and more than one ), where you can not only get an answer from the support service, but also get a lot of information about the project that is not available in other places.

7. Twitter Telegram is run by Russians

Someone Russian is clearly involved in running Telegram Twitter: despite the use of English, the origin of the author of the messages is revealed by emoticons from closing brackets (characteristic only for Russian-speaking users), frequent syntax errors and tracing paper when translating from Russian, as well as an excellent sense of humor . Such tweets are published from an iPhone.

@robsonsobral ignoring people is more about attitude than privacy. )) But in fact, this way it is easier to pretend you didn't even get it..

— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) March 3, 2014

However, some of the tweets are definitely published by Telegram representative Marcus Ra, although he offers some developers access to Pavel Durov. He himself uses Android (you can check this tweet ). At the same time, Ra is the only one who officially deals with media relations in Telegram: the project does not have a team of PR people, and respond on Twitter. “Telegram founders who speak several languages”

You can also contact Marcus Ra using Telegram by sending a message to +42. As you know, 42 is the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything” according to Douglas Adams .

8. The “fall” of WhatsApp became Telegram’s finest hour and dark day at the same time

During the hysteria with the four-hour “fall” of WhatsApp , fueled by the sale of the messenger to the unloved Facebook corporation, users began to register en masse on Telegram. If before this 300-400 thousand new users were added per day, then the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook raised this figure to almost a million per day.

Within a day after the incident, Telegram received about 5 million new registrations. This growth rate was not expected for another two months .

The creators of the service did not expect such an influx: the servers could handle about 1 million new users per day. As a result, Telegram could not stand it and also went offline for 2 hours for the European part of the audience.

9. Telegram does not and will not have advertising

The absence of advertising is written into the DNA of Telegram. Similar words can be heard from Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp, however, according to some information, may appear there. tools for promoting brands

10. Telegram has 2 official and about a dozen unofficial versions

There are only two official Telegram clients: for iPhone and for Android. Officiality means that Telegram recognizes both the quality of the client and its own authorship.

Among the unofficial ones there are clients for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, a browser version from Igor Zhukov, another client for Android (the so-called S-edition), as well as seven different clients for Windows Phone of varying degrees of readiness. Complete list of Telegram clients .

Since the Telegram code and MtProto API are open, anyone can make their own client for Telegram, but other “crafts” are not yet of the quality to be recognized even as unofficial clients.

11. Telegram servers are located in 5 different parts of the world

The cloud servers that host Telegram data are located in five different locations around the world. European users are served by a data center in London , Asian users in Singapore , and Mexican users in San Francisco .

central repository There is no : they all operate independently, and the user can be switched between different data centers.

12. Telegram headquarters is in Berlin

Although Digital Fortress is headquartered in Buffalo, New York, the Telegram team is not located there. Telegram's main office is located in Berlin, although in November 2013 Bloomberg called Telegram "Moscow-based".

According to representatives of the service, being located in Germany makes them independent “from both the NSA and the KGB.”

13. Taking over Telegram data centers is pointless

Data in data centers is stored on hard drives in encrypted form . Telegram states that even penetration into the data center and physical access to the disks will not allow obtaining user correspondence data: each cluster is encrypted with a special key, which is stored in another cluster under a different jurisdiction.

And the key that gives access to the user’s secret correspondence is stored only on his device and nowhere else .

14. The content of secret chats is available only to the sender and recipient

Secret chats are a special type of chat on Telegram in which only two people can participate. They use enhanced security measures: for example, end-to-end encryption and the absence of message text previews in push notifications.

Although messages in secret chats are transmitted through Telegram servers, after delivery they are deleted from them and stored only on the devices of the two participants in the chat. The creators of Telegram claim that even they themselves cannot access this correspondence.

Secret chats won't let you save photos you receive, but that could change as the creators are looking to ban screenshots instead.

15. The main advantage of Telegram is 200 participants in a conversation

The creators of Telegram consider the main advantage , oddly enough, not security or speed, but the size of group chats: they support up to 200 participants simultaneously.

As the representatives of the service themselves say , “big chats are cute.”

In WhatsApp, the size of a group chat is limited to 50 participants, in VKontakte - 30. However, not everyone can handle even this volume of participants in a group conversation .

16. Telegram is unpopular in Russia

According to Durov, Russia accounts for only 1% of service users. But the international expansion of the Russian project is much more successful: Telegram has become a “ hit in India ,” and 200 thousand new users are registered daily in Spanish-speaking countries. In total, 5 million people use the service every day (all data as of early February).

In September 2013, at the dawn of its appearance, Telegram aroused interest among Arabs : according to Pavel Durov, several thousand people were registered daily in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. In October, Telegram’s daily audience was only 100 thousand people.

After the explosion of attention for Telegram at the end of February, the application reached 1st place in the App Store of 48 different countries and even 4th place in the ranking of free applications in the ultra-competitive American App Store. In this regard, in addition to the Spanish and Arabic localizations, were added translations into German and Dutch . There are still no versions in French, as well as in Russian - perhaps they will be added when demand increases .

17. Telegram became a stumbling block between Durov and UCP

in April 2013 The UCP Foundation, which bought a 48% stake in VKontakte , has repeatedly accused Pavel Durov of participating in third-party projects, misusing the company’s resources and using its employees. Since Telegram was officially announced on August 14, 2013, it has become a major headache for UCP.

Foundation partner Yuri Kachuro stated that the UCP was considering the possibility of Durov’s resignation: they did not like that with the help of Telegram Durov was trying to “sit on two chairs”, and because of him the development of VKontakte was happening too slowly. Subsequently, UCP even tried to spread information about the unreliability of the messenger through the publication Roem.ru. According to Durov, due to UCP pressure, several key employees left VKontakte.

18. Telegram completely disowns the VKontakte trace

Telegram representatives state that they “have nothing to do with VK.” The money from Pavel Durov, on which the project exists, came in the form of a donation . Durov himself wrote that he founded Digital Fortress with money from the sale of his shares in VKontakte in 2007 and 2010.

In October 2013, Pavel Durov wrote that his brother Nikolai, who works as a part-time technical director at VKontakte, can, under the terms of the contract, work on any third-party projects. Telegram representatives call Nikolai “ours.”

The IT director of Digital Fortress, the fund through which Telegram is financed, is Axel Neff, VKontakte's assistant director for international operations. At the same time, Telegram calls itself “an independent project that has nothing to do with social networks,” although at the VKontakte New Year’s party there were banners with Telegram.

19. Durov paid millions in prizes for Telegram clients

To ensure real competition between developers and high quality of execution, Pavel Durov successively announced several competitions to create Telegram clients for different platforms. The iPhone application appeared out of competition, but the author of the best client for Android received a million rubles (another million was distributed among the other participants).

In November 2013, Durov announced a new competition to create a client for Windows Phone. This time the prize fund was 3 million rubles. The competition takes place in several stages, and the winner, whose client will receive official status, has not yet been chosen.

20. WhatsApp founder called Telegram plagiarism

The day after the Telegram application for iPhone was released, WhatsApp founder and CEO Jan Koum spoke about it : “Pavel Durov only knows how to copy products like Facebook and WhatsApp. He never had original ideas and never will.”

Durov answered Kum in his characteristic manner: “There are no plans to transfer grandmothers from WhatsApp. […] The ultimate goal is a messenger with advanced social/geolocation functions. […] Telegram is an intermediate product, although it will appeal to those who love quality.”

Bonus fact: Telegram representatives did not contact TJournal

Telegram regularly communicates with the press: Marcus Ra usually advises and gives small comments, and Pavel Durov himself can speak about major news events. on the project website There is a separate page where you can see fairly recent media publications about Telegram, carefully collected by hand.

However, no one from Telegram responded to TJournal’s numerous requests: neither Pavel Durov, nor Marcus Ra, nor Axel Neff. They also did not respond to the request sent through the standard form on the project website.

I'm waiting for the answer tone,
Nikita Likhachev,
TJournal

#Article #Pavel_Durov #VKontakte #Telegram #crowdfunding #WhatsApp #NSB #monetization #Ilya_Perekopsky #Nikolai_Durov #Digital_Fortress #MTProto #applications_for_iPhone #United_Capital_Partners_UCP #Axel_Neff #Igor_Zhukov #apps_for_Android #encryption #messengers #hacking_ Telegram #vulnerabilities_in_Telegram #conflict_of_shareholders_VKontakte #applications_for_Windows_Phone #Jan_Kum #cryptomessengers #safe_messengers #messenger_for_Android #Marcus_Ra #open_software #Telegram_team members #who_is_behind_the_creation of_Telegram #Yan_Kum_o_Telegram #Pavel_Durov_o_WhatsApp #official_clients_Telegram