Telegram is one of my favourite messaging apps and I kind of get excited when they are about to announce some new features that will make the experience better.
Telegram Messenger has grown from being a simple cloud based messaging app to become a community of over 100 million apps that send texts, create stickers/themes, build bots for use and also recently make voice calls. There is still so much more that can be done in improving the overall experience and Telegram’s co-founder shared a snippet of an upcoming blogpost that highlights several exciting updates on Telegram Messenger.
As spotted by Vasili Shinkorenko, Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov is planning to release some cool new features that could be rolled out in the future.
Bot Payments
Telegram launched the Bot Platform back in 2015 which they went ahead to bolster it with a major 2.0 update in 2016. Since then, we have seen people come up with various bots that we use everyday and also led Telegram to launch a gaming platform based on that bot platform.
Pavel Durov shared a preview of a blogpost about an upcoming update on Telegram where it showed that they are probably going to launch Bot Payments in the next update.
“Bot Payments is a way for bots to accept payments from their users worldwide,” Durov said in the shared post. It will be a new platform for payment providers to connect to this platform.
Apparently most of the payments will be handled by Stripe and each payment goes directly from the user to the bot developer. Telegram will not profit from the transactions. Also, they won’t see the credit card data and if there are disputes, this will be dealt directly by bot developers.
Once the system is live, you will fill your credit card information (gladly only once) and confirm the payment.
The other features
Telescope
This will be a platform for users to view video messages from public channels which can be shared on social media accounts. The website is actually live in a way, I’m yet to try it out.
Video messages
Telegram is also planning a way to allow you to share video messages with your friends. We have to wait and see how this will be implemented.
Instant View platform
Telegram announced Instant View, their Instant Articles like platform that will allow people to load articles basically instantaneously a while back. However, it was only limited to Medium articles or TechCrunch posts.
The Instant View Platform will connect Instant Views to your website so that people can load your articles much much faster. This is one update that I’ve been waiting for and we only have to wait for Telegram to officially announce it.
