Telegram, the uber popular secure messaging app, has today branched out to introduce to the masses its own blogging platform — Telegraph. But, it has taken a different approach to blogging as compared to other widely-used platforms like WordPress, Medium or ghost. This service frees you from the burden of registration.
This blogging platform frees you from the burden of registration and allows you to simply visit their website to begin drafting the content. It is based on the basic concept of anonymity and doesn’t require you to set up an account before moving on to publish your post. The service pushes you to just start typing away until your heart desires. You can then wish to add your name (or leave the space empty) and directly hit publish to make your story live on the interwebs.
Due to the availability of just the content editing window, the website is very minimalistic and lightweight as compared to other platforms. It enables you to start off by writing the heading , your name and then the required text — with capabilities to format it with markdown. You can further jazz up your posts with the addition of photos from your storage, YouTube links, and other standard embeds. As for editing, you only have the functionality to edit a post – if you keep that tab open or don’t clear Telegraph’s cache. Otherwise, you don’t have the option to edit your published stories.
In the official blog post, Telegram describes the blogging service as:
[Telegraph] is a publishing tool that lets you create rich posts with markdown, photos, and all sorts of embedded stuff.
Though Telegram has tried to ease blogging with this launch but the concept of anonymity has a couple backlogs for the platform as a whole. On platforms like Medium or WordPress, you have a dedicated blog or profile page where you have the ability to collate your published posts and view or share it when the need arises. But, in Telegraph, you won’t be able to catalog you published work in a single window but would need to collect and safely store the links of each of your stories. You can use these links to share your stories on social media or with your friends and family.
Secondly, Telegraph might have debuted with anonymity at its core to enable users to freely voice/type their views without having to care for identity. This might be important after the unexpected outcome of U.S presidential elections but the same doesn’t come without risks. Users can use it for the proliferation of hate speech, abuse, trolling. The interwebs are already cluttered with fake or misleading content and this would give some users a chance to add to the noise.
In addition, Telegram has also updated its application to introduce the ‘Instant View’ feature to read stories within the chat window. This is synonymous to Facebook’s Instant Articles and Google’s AMP, which enable you to natively open rich media links in minimal load times. In addition to numerous performance updates, Telegram has recently also introduced bot-powered games within its messaging app. You can start by typing @gamebot in a group chat to access the variety of games. You can then play the game, attain a high score and challenge your friends to go up against you. These addition fall in line with company’s vision of making add-on services available within the messaging app itself.
