I'm not sure it is a joke, my friends chat on fb were talking about, and they found out about it cuz some other friends were talking about it in their timelines.

Whatsapp is down, so people are looking for alternatives of course. Sad is not textsecure instead.

Textsecure has obviously problem with 'how to use this thing' and 'we don't want another SMS app'.

Not just a clone; its selling point is that the clients and protocol are open-source and it supports end-to-end encryption.

The Messenger for Telegram app for Mac plays very well with the entire Telegram ecosystem.

IMHO, Telegram's (open source) value proposition is more up do date with the current multi-platform ecosystem per user.

https://telegram.org/apps