A few days ago, the Telegram team took to their blog to celebrate having more than 100,000,000 monthly active users. Now, they've updated 'channels' to version 2.0, bringing a slew of new features including: links to posts, silent messages, admin signatures, message editing in channels and supergroups, and a quick share button for bots.
Briefly, an explanation of channels for new or non-users of Telegram: channels can be created to broadcast messages out to an unlimited number of subscribers. They can be made publicly available so that anyone can subscribe to receive new updates. Even if you join a channel after it has been created, you can still scroll back through all of the messages ever posted.
Channels 2.0 greatly improves channels. For instance, links to posts allows you to select an individual message that had been broadcasted to a channel and share it with friends outside of Telegram or post it on other social networks. When the outside user clicks the link, they'll get taken to the channel and the message will be highlighted.
Silent messages allow channel admins to post a new message without notifying users. This feature is useful for late nights and non-urgent updates. To send a silent message, the user must tap the bell icon to toggle silent messages.
Admin signatures will let followers know who sent out the message without linking to the poster's profile. Typos can be fixed in channels and supergroups by tapping (double tap on iOS) on the message and then pressing 'Edit'. Finally, quick share buttons for bots allow users to share links, pictures, and videos that they get from bots.
Telegram has has a bad time as of late after the service was endorsed by ISIS for its followers to use. It's encryption scheme, MTProto, was also criticised by well known cryptographers such as Moxie Marlinspike because it was made in-house by the Telegram team and was not tried and tested. When it comes to encryption it is important to get code publicly scrutinised to remove any bugs.
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