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

In that regard I think the title is misleading: Durov plans to make money through the app eventually, just not through selling people's information or push advertising.

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.

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.

What I really want is an open version of Skype where the private key can always be generated by the user's mind, overcomes all the limitations like NAT that make users second class netizens, has no central tracker, and (optionally, but possibly required to work around the limitations) allows a certain amount of traffic to be forwarded like Tor.

I don't see how we can have a conversation about who pays for messaging when the underlying infrastructure for truly secure online communication hasn't yet gone mainstream. I don't really trust Freenet or Tor and can't quite figure out how come, so maybe we could start there and figure out why that is.

And a billion dollars for anything messaging-related completely blows my mind. Most of the world-changing software was developed for a few thousand dollars by a couple of people working in their spare time. To me, paying that much completely misses the point and probably hinders progress by locking capital up in niches that exclude developers who are working towards creating a non-scarcity based economy.

Paid messaging apps, however (at least until they get acquired by advertising companies like Facebook), give companies incentives to service their customers first, and the users are actually the customers. That's why Slack and WhatsApp and HipChat and Basecamp have taken off--because they offer the security and paid customer/company relationship.

This article's title is woefully non-conclusive. Sure it would be wonderful if ALL messaging apps could by built and funded by Russian billionaires such they were private and free for the end user, but the fact is that to support the infrastructure of a billion+ user messaging app, you need to make money. And if you can't make money from the users to whom you are promising security and privacy (and thus to whom you owe allegiance), you have to make money elsewhere. And the alternative is arguably what has caused so many security and privacy problems in the first place.

Tested Tox last year but it was super buggy. TextSecure looked good but doesn't seem to have as many users. I think Telegram will keep growing.

I just watched Durov's talk with Jimmy Wales from a couple of years back and he comes across like he genuinely cares about ideas that benefit all internet users more so than money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM

Still, doesn't seem like a sustainable path to have the messaging infrastructure be a responsibility of one company, both for security and financial reasons. Surely some kind of tox style p2p infrastructure would be better?

This is dreadful. The Free software movement has existed for decades and Telegram brings nothing new to the table that Google hadn't already a decade ago (open yet crippled protocol, proprietary servers). There is nothing new here, besides the fact that Telegram basically makes no money. Which is also nothing new, since Google Talk and Voice never made money either!

I don't mind it, because we know the protocol and can reengineer the clients easily in the event they betray their users trust. It is much better than WhatsApp or Skype being a whole-pipe black box. But at the end of the day, XMPP has existed, has improved, and today provides all the features of all these other messaging transports and more, the problem is there is no money to be had in providing an easy signup XMPP service, so nobody advertises them. Which makes Telegram perplexing, because their only valuable resource is their userbase, and they are not directly monetizing it at all. Contrast that with Duckduckgo having an XMPP server @dukgo.com that basically got a blog post and hasn't been talked about much since, that I use all the time on all my devices.

But fundamentally none of this absolves how stupid all these companies re-implement a wheel poorly (XMPP) because the old wheel is so well known and understood that you can't lock people in or profit off the users using it.

If so, that's what we need. Email was once a bunch of proprietary systems - MCIMail, CompuServ, AOL, etc. It was inconvenient that they didn't interoperate. All those proprietary systems were wiped out by an open one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Durov

I completely agree. In this ideal situation, who pays for it? The article seems to have left this small detail out. How do you plan on getting this service to work without someone footing the bill?