Telegraph – a service for formatting and publishing text in Telegram

In the end of November 2016, a team of the Telegram messenger’s developers introduced a new service for online publications. Telegraph is a specific tool which allows creating large texts on the basis of the simple markdown language. By means of the given platform, it is possible to publish articles containing photos, videos and other inline elements in the Internet. In addition, no registration with personal data indication is required which allows retaining complete anonymity.

Opportunities for bloggers provided by this new platform

According to the service’s developers, a user has a possibility of feeding information like the traditional mass media do. Telegraph has everything required for this purpose:

• Italic and boldface types;
• Bullet and numerated lists;
• Quote indention;
• Image allocation;
• Streaming of YouTube videos;
• Expansion of Twitter posts.

In the Telegram messenger, you can view materials created by means of Telegraph via the new Instant View feature which immediately expands the content directly in a dialogue window of a channel or a chat. The main task of the given functional is to provide maximum ease of information reading, as a result of which there is no longer any necessity of leaving the messenger in order to refer to the primary source of information.

The content created via Telegraph looks the same as materials posted on web resources of the regular mass media. However, the author’s anonymity and a possibility of viewing articles directly in the messenger open unique opportunities for modern bloggers.

How to work with Telegraph

In order to use the given tool, you need to visit this website: www.telegra.ph. When following this address, a user gets on a practically empty page with three simple words: Title, Your name and Your story.

• The Title line is meant for writing the article’s title forming a link to the content along with the publication date. For example, the article «Video Calls (Beta)» published on March, 31 will have the following link: «http://telegra.ph/Video-Calls-BETA-03-31».



• The Your Name line is not obligatory to fill. An author may indicate his real name, nickname or live this line empty for no one could identify his personality.
• Your story is a field where your main content should be formed. Here the above-mentioned opportunities for formatting texts are given as well. The article creation algorithm is very simple and easy-to-understand, so the users are supposed to have no difficulties with its writing.

A unique link allows using published material not only in Telegram but also on other websites. Moreover, a creator can update his content at any moment. However, the truth is that such feature is available only if cookies are saved.

To create an article, a minimum of actions are required from the user. However, this lightness has the opposite side. Further editing can be performed only on the same device and in the same browser in which the text was published for the first time. The developers foresaw this situation, and made a special bot @telegraph for managing publications. We list its functional:

• Authorization in Telegraph from your Telegram account. Creating an entry in this way, you can log in to any other device and have access to editing. At the first authorization on each device, the robot will suggest adding all previously created posts to your account.
• Statistics of views of any telegraph-post. All transitions to the article, not only from the Telegram, but from any external resources are taken into account here. You can analyze not only your own publications, just send the bot the link you are interested in.
• You can specify a permanent nickname and a link to the profile so that you do not specify them each time.

Telegraph is a real threat to the traditional mass media?

Messengers which belong to the media sphere are progressing at a quick rate while evolving into user-friendly platforms for the useful information publication. The appearance of such service as Telegraph has made the process of the full-featured business platform creation even easier for attracting the end user. Even now lots of brands come to the realization that the type of communication like this is becoming increasingly relevant.

Nevertheless, it is still premature to state that messengers in general and Telegraph in particular provide direct competition for the traditional mass media. Such services are determined by specialists as an additional tool for the generation of the web content which may become an excellent support for the mass media. However, they are not able to swallow them up at the given stage of their development.