Last week Jeff Chandler and I had a meetup before WordCamp OKC where we discussed new ideas and projects for the Tavern. One quick item on the agenda was to create a Telegram bot and public channel where we can broadcast to those who want to receive news via mobile messaging.
In February, Telegram passed 100 million monthly active users. The cloud-based messaging app, which focuses on security and speed, is averaging 350,000 new users per day and delivers 15 billion messages daily.
Telegram is especially popular in international markets like Iran where the app accounts for 40% of the country’s international bandwidth. Because Telegram CEO Pavel Durov refuses to comply with the Iranian government’s censorship requests, the app is popular with Iranians for news, communication, and entertainment. Iran accounts for 20% of the Telegram’s monthly users, and only the US has a larger number.
During the first half of 2016 the app’s creators have been beefing up Telegram’s bot platform to get developers engaged and make more multimedia content available directly in the app. Our new WP Tavern bot makes it possible to broadcast our posts to Telegram as soon as they are published. If you want another way to stay connected to WordPress news, you can join our channel at: https://telegram.me/wptavern.
Participation in the channel is read-only and you can customize your notifications in case you don’t want a push notification every time we publish. As mobile messaging apps now rival traditional social media outlets for interaction on the web, WP Tavern will continue to experiment with new ways of reaching our readers.
Any technical details how it was implemented?