Messaging apps shouldn't make money – Pavel Durov and Telegram

There have been countless attempts to 'own email', and before that, 'own Gopher' and 'own Archie' and so on. There was, once, Hotmail. Then came GMail, and then .. Facebook.

It's quite possible to maintain your own social network with email alone. You can achieve the same results with a mailing list as you can with the Facebook timeline.

The only difference is that you must educate the people in your network to understand how the technology works, and how to operate it in order to function in as effective a manner as is required to maintain a high standard of communication. The fact that this is nearly impossible in the modern context - that you cannot get a group of 200+ people to operate email in the same, standardized manner, is what Facebook - and other mass-communication media - depend upon in order to gain their market share.

I would abandon Facebook in 5 minutes if I could be guaranteed that the people I care about - the links in my social network - were as competent at handling the solution as would be required in order to maintain the quality of communication that Facebook currently delivers. Alas, this is not possible - and those who are attempting to monetize and profit from this mass stupidity will do little to address the issue - for after all, it matters that people don't know how to write a proper email. This is the only reason Facebook has survived as long as it has.

If you want to truly revolutionize communications in this day and age, do something that allows people to use the existing, free, technologies of communication to increase the quality of communication among the masses. Alas, this is a very difficult problem - and like all social ills, the solution is education. The absolute hardest problem there is to solve, out there, today: teaching someone how to use an existing technology to effectively communicate.

That's a business model common for SAAS applications, I don't really think it's related to free software. Gcc on linux doesn't send usage statistics to someone, I hope.

Telegram hasn't done a very good job of eliminating the possibility of profit. The secret chat feature is actually a marginal use case. By default messages are readable by the back end. In fact, group chats are also reasable by the back end always, and any conversation which can be accessed from multiple devices. And last I heard, the official windows desktop app does not have secret chats.

All of these messages are the normal use case on telegram. And the text is being indexed by the back end for easy searching capabilities. So essentially telegram has built a search engine for the conversations of tens of millions of people who are slightly more paranoid and want a secure messenger. Not only that, many of the tens of millions have shared their entire address book with names and phone numbers because the official clients required them to.

If they're trying to avoid having valuable information that someone would pay money for, they're not doing a very good job.