When Telegram was first born, in 2013, few people gave this service a chance for successful development. Indeed, at that time, WhatsApp gained popularity and continued to grow, besides it, there were Facebook Messenger, popular in the US, WeChat in China, and Line in Japan and South Korea. In a word, the market is divided, and it was difficult to imagine a new player here. However, after just two years, few people doubt the success of Telegram and the fact that this service will definitely take its place among the most popular and demanded. At the same time, the path chosen by the developers to popularize the service in the world is very correct and logical – to focus on additional features and constantly add new ones, and not sit and wait for people to just start using the 'telegram' instead of 'whatsapp' or something more. And it is the chosen path of development of the service that today turns Telegram into a separate layer of the Internet, where everything is. But is it good?
In the summer of 2015, the simplest bots and APIs for their creation appeared in Telegram, for the first few months this 'topic' was not particularly popular and, let's say, local, but by the end of the year the situation began to change. The first bots were created by users, rather as attempts to understand what it is and why it is needed. After some time, some news resources, popular bloggers made their bots, and large companies picked up the idea behind them. Today, even some well-known publications in the world, for example, Forbes, have their own bots on Telegram, and these are only official bots. Unofficial, that is, created by users, is at Reuters, BBC and many other agencies and publications.
Around the same time as the growing popularity of news bots, others began to appear – helping with the translation of words from one language to another, with the search for information about tickets, showing the weather, different games that can be played by several people at once, and so on. It became clear that the potential of the bot system in Telegram is much higher than it seemed initially (although the developers themselves probably immediately understood what it would be).
Finally, several bots providing access to music and other content: videos, films, TV shows, have become a new round in the development of bots in Telegram. As in the case with another project of Pavel Durov, the social network Vkontakte, the developers almost do not limit the possibilities of the user community in any way, as a result, now you can find thousands of films, TV series and music tracks on Telegram. Free, of course. Everyone can subscribe to one of the bots and download movies and other content to their smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. In addition, Telegram already has a built-in video player, browser and other utilities for viewing various content without leaving the program.
Telegram has become a separate 'internet' where almost everything can be found; it replaces news sites, blogs, services like translators, weather sites and even torrents, as strange as it sounds. The latter, as I see it, will become the main and serious problem for the creators of Telegram – hundreds of gigabytes of illegal content available via Telegram will hardly please copyright holders in different countries, and sooner or later the company will face the need to make some kind of global decision on blocking bots of this type that distribute content. Or another solution, I don't know.
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