Chronicles of Durov, two reasons to quit Facebook and Zuckerberg who dropped out

The theme of the release is the chronicles of Pavel Durov.

In the week since Facebook's global infrastructure outage , Telegram has gained millions of new users, mostly from Latin America, specifically Brazil and Panama.

We covered the great exodus of Brazilians from non-working WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger in a separate article. According to The Bell, up to 15 million people in Latin America could have installed Telegram within five days of the failure.

But the entrepreneurial chronicles of Pavel Durov are not limited to a successful failure that will help expand the Telegram audience to the planned 300 million users per month in 2019. He was even lucky twice - the day after the failure, Facebook announced the departure of key top managers, including the vice president of WhatsApp.

It is WhatsApp that is the sworn enemy of the creator of Telegram. To understand the competitive relationship between the two messengers, it is recommended to re-read Pavel Durov's post “How to predict new WhatsApp features” four years ago. It starts like this: “The good thing about Telegram development is that you can get bigger apps to improve your product. And predict their actions.

By the end of 2019, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger will move to a common infrastructure, exposing 2.7 billion users against the same 300 million using Telegram.

At the same time, this infrastructure is developing new features, including a crypto platform (WhatsApp will launch it in the first half of 2019, albeit in a truncated form). This increases competition and narrows the technology gap.

more for GRAM The Telegram crypto platform, on the contrary, is lagging behind, although potential investors are already giving four times compared to what real investors gave.

2 reasons to quit Facebook even if its servers are running

• The company does not pay enough attention to the security of your data. As it turned out on March 21, Facebook has stored hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext since 2012. Between 200 and 600 million users were affected, whose passwords could be seen by 20,000 Facebook employees.
• WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton recommends deleting your Facebook account. He left Facebook in 2017 over plans to monetize the messaging app he created and has been urging users to do the same ever since.
• Acton's argument is simple—advertising tech companies like Google and Facebook value money over user privacy. Speaking to Stanford students the other day, Acton repeated his argument: “We gave them power [over us]. This is bad news. We buy their products, register on these sites. Delete Facebook, okay?"

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Columnist Douglas Rushkoff wonders what if Mark Zuckerberg hadn't left Harvard and gone on to graduate? His main thesis: although Zuckerberg managed to get the right programming skills and meet the right people, without a higher education he lost the historical, cultural, economic and political context for his further work.