Telegram, Threema or Whatsapp?

In medialand things change constantly, so it may not have come as a surprise that the telegram underwent pretty drastic changes. A telegram used to be an oral message laid down in written format, sent via a post office. It was usually shorter than a tweet and faster yet more expensive than a letter. Now Telegram is back, as the rapidly growing alternative for WhatsApp. 'Mail me' turned into 'text me' turned into 'whatsapp me'. The service grew as big as 465 million users and caught Mark Zuckerberg's roving eye. Facebook acquired WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars. As Whatsapp is a free service which only charges one dollar after the first year of usage, it will take Mr Zuckerberg quite some time to redeem that money - even when they double in size, as Business Insider estimated last February. It makes you wonder what the real reason for the acquisition was. After Whatsapp's take-over, many people seemed fed up with the ever-growing Zuckerberg imperium and its NSA-like tendencies, and started looking for alternatives. My German friends massively flocked to Threema, a messaging service from Switzerland. Jawohl! Reliable, non-US based, so worth the €1,59 fee. Its userbase doubled from 200.000 to 400.000 in the first 24 hours after Whatsapp's take-over and kept growing against the backdrop of NSA schandals and ongoing data protection issues. Bye bye Whatsapp, hallöschen Threema. From my 30 friends currently on Threema, 29 are German. The odd one out is a fellow Dutch geek, who probably just wanted to check out the service. On the other hand, many of my international contacts either still use Whatsapp or have moved to Telegram, which seems to be gaining foothold, especially among younger users. It may not play the same safety cards as Threema, but its functionality is very similar to Whatsapp and, most importantly, it is free of charge. My son tried out several options, but still prefers Whatsapp because 'everyone has it' and at his age this is an important factor as group chats are all the rage. So - Telegram does well in the 15-40 age bracket, the responsible and savvy communicators who don't wish to store their data in US-based clouds. Until they realise that Telegram is owned by Pavel Durov, the Russian millionaire responsible for VKontakte,  the large social network that is popular in many former Soviet countries. This leaves us with a rather classic question: are Russian clouds safer than American ones? Or not that classic: Durov, who lives in the US, was dismissed as CEO last week, coincidentally after refusing Vladimir Putin's demands to hand over information on opposition leaders. However it may be - perhaps those damn reliable Swiss aren't such a bad alternative after all.