9
8 Comments

Telegram launches voice chat, ad platform, begins to monetize

  1. 8

    2020 is the year I went from one active chat in Telegram to many dozens. It's become by far my favorite chat app. I recently convinced most of my friends to move our group chats over from Google Hangouts, and they love it, too. Not surprised it has 500M active users.

    The most interesting part of this news to me is the voice chat.

    I tried it out over the weekend. It's basically your own private Clubhouse room, but inside of a Telegram group where there's also text chat going on. This means you can have people talking and chatting at the same time, or perhaps people on the "stage" talking via voice while people in the "audience" chat via text. (In Clubhouse the people in the audience have no way to communicate.)

    This makes Telegram a surprisingly ideal place to… host calls for a podcast?

    Hear me out.

    Telegram is now the only app that's (a) already widely used, (b) can host high-quality voice calls, (c) supports a persistent, private community of people who can listen in on the call and (d) have a high-quality chat-based conversation while the call continues.

    So you could do the following as a podcaster:

    1. Create a Telegram group as a community for your podcast listeners.
    2. When recording a new episode, invite your interviewees and/or your cohosts to the group and start up a voice chat.
    3. Record your episode while your community members who are part of the group listen in live, chat with each other, and send you messages.

    Bonus: All of your previous podcast guests would be inside your community, so you'd have a pretty badass group.

    You could arguably do this on YouTube or Twitch, but this has the added benefit of being a native phone app that sends push notifications. And I'd guess your Telegram-based community would be much more active, because Telegram is persistent chat, whereas YouTube and Twitch chat cease to exist when you're not streaming.

    Zoom is out of the question, because the chat UI sucks, it lacks moderation tools, it also isn't persistent, and it doesn't send notifications when you go live. And Clubhouse doesn't allow chat, isn't widely available, and (I think) only supports public rooms.

    I might do this for Indie Hackers…

    1. 1

      That would be sweet.

  2. 1

    This happened earlier than expected
    https://wordcounter.tools

  3. 1

    It's also ethical (at least to date), unlike the 'competitor' apps by F.

  4. 1

    Also it's great opportunity to advertise cheaply on the new market

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 47 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 27 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments