A lot has already been said about Telegram in the context of the position of the Russian authorities and unsuccessful attempts to block it on the territory of the Russian Federation, so you will not find anything new in this matter in this material. Let's better talk about what Telegram is missing, discuss some positive news in this regard, and look at the concepts that were noted by the development team.
Splitting chats
Sharing chats on Telegram is a sore point for many active users of the messenger. The appearance of channels in the messenger overshadowed RSS feeds and Twitter as news sources. I will not speak for everyone, but for many people from my environment, Telegram has become the main hub, where information from all resources interesting to a particular user flows. It's one thing when you subscribe to 2-4 channels and, in principle, manage to follow every message, but when the number of subscriptions grows to at least 10, the list of dialogs in Telegram turns into uncontrollable chaos.
Agree that at one point or another you want to focus on one thing. If this is the height of the working day, then you want to have a focus of attention directed to work contacts or those channels from which you need information for work. Now there is a moment for hobbies and hobbies – let's watch what is happening in the world of technology, politics or films. And on weekends, maybe it is generally worth focusing only on contacts with relatives or friends, and if there are none, put off the messenger along with the smartphone to hell. Each has its own model, and I will not display some common denominator here, I will just say that Telegram has long turned into something more than a messenger, which means that it needs to come to the ability to categorize contacts, channels and bots.
It is likely that initially the Telegram team did not anticipate such an interest in channels and basically united the list of all chats in one window. Thanks to this, the messenger still has one of the highest average reach rates per post. Subscribing to a channel means that information from it will be on a par with your entire social circle in the messenger, which means that it will reach you as quickly as possible and you are most likely to read it.
I will assume that among you there are such perfectionists who cannot live peacefully if they have some unread messages and dialogues. I also happen to be like this from time to time, so I often arrange total cleansing on Telegram and social networks, otherwise the uncontrolled flow of content threatens with distraction, procrastination and lack of efficiency.
Based on all this, Telegram is sorely lacking a sorting mechanism. And I'm not talking about dividing dialogs, chats, channels and bots into four different groups, but about the possibility of combining all four according to any principle and in any combination. Let's say work contacts, work chats and channels with the information necessary for work are in one pile, family members, friends and family-friendly chats in another, and everything related to hobbies and hobbies is in the third.
By the way, the developers of the messenger are probably already concerned about this issue, and that's why I think so. Just a month ago, there was activity on the official Telegram channel @designers, which, according to the description, was created to publish user interface concepts that the messenger team liked. So, exactly half of the concepts published there to date are directly related to chat sharing. The sign, of course, is indirect, but a hint can be traced. And here are the options themselves:
By the way, at the beginning of 2018, in one of the beta versions of Telegram for macOS, an interesting feature appeared that allowed you to combine several channels into one “feed”. On the day of its appearance, for some reason, it was disabled at the server level.
A question for active Telegram users, what do you think about this? Are you waiting for separation or is everything okay?
Payments
The exchange of funds within the messenger is so convenient and useful that Sberbank itself recently drew attention to it. Only he did not implement his technology in some popular messenger, but implemented the messenger in his own banking application. Same approach, what can you do.
But within the framework of this material, we are exclusively interested in Telegram, and in it the financial component is still covered in darkness and secrecy. When TON will be, what it will be, and how the exchange of fiat money into cryptocurrency will be implemented, is still not known for certain. Exactly the same as what the legal status of this currency in Russia will be, but I think that nothing good should be expected here. But, one way or another, financial instruments in Telegram should appear.
The video concept posted on the @designers channel shows how, within the framework of the messenger, it is possible to transfer both fiat rubles and dollars, as well as Gram cryptocoins, including in the form of a donation. The concept itself is extremely curious, someone even sees in it a deliberate drain of the interface of the crypto platform.
If you do not complicate the “crypt” and move away from the topic of TON, then the most simple and understandable idea here is to link existing cards and use them for monetary transactions. The concept of such an implementation was also found on the @designers channel, it looks quite interesting.
I can't say how many users really need this functionality, but the Chinese seem to like it, they have been paying for purchases for a long time and exchanging yuan in the framework of the national messenger WeChat.
Group calls
It so happened that Telegram became my main means of communication both for work and for personal matters. And what is missing so much is group calls. Maybe Pavel Durov and the team feel sorry for finishing off half-dead Skype, but almost two years have passed since Telegram began to support calls, and collective “telephony” did not appear. You have to exchange nicknames on Telegram, and then collect conferences in Skype. But you can simply do as in the concept below, and everyone will be happy:
Freeze notifications
Large chats with heated discussions, even with notifications turned off, constantly hang out at the top of the list and often get in the way when you are doing other things and you are not going to take part in the discussion. Several times I caught myself thinking that there is not enough temporary blocking of notifications so that new messages do not raise the dialogue to the top of the list and do not distract from really important correspondence. As it turned out, I'm not the only one thinking about this. Here is another custom concept that Telegram developers have not ignored.
Prompt and competent support
While preparing this note, I decided to ask experienced colleagues who run a popular 100-thousand channel on Telegram what they lack. It became curious if they have something that we, ordinary users, do not see. As it turned out, there is, and this is the lack of operational and competent support. The fact is that the role of support in Telegram is performed by volunteers who respond rather slowly and do not always help. Telegram probably does not have the funds for high-quality staff due to the complete lack of monetization. Most likely, progress in this direction should be expected after the launch of TON.
Conclusion
Share your thoughts in the comments, what concepts you liked and what the messenger is missing for you. And once again I ask you to bypass the topic of locks and bans, today we are not talking about that.