Encrypted messaging service Telegram just launched its very own publishing platform. The simple tool, dubbed Telegraph, is aimed at making blogging accessible to everyone.
Best of all, you don’t even need a Telegram account to take advantage of the platform, neither are you required to activate it using social media. Telegraph works by placing a cookie in your browser. All you have to do is head to its website and start typing your next masterpiece.
Seeing as the tool is aiming for general usability, it also doesn’t offer the kind of features provided by its closest rivals — the first that pops to mind is Medium, a blogging platform created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. You won’t find any cool design templates or scheduling functions on Telegraph.
In Telegram’s words, the blogging platform lets you create “rich posts with markdown … and all sorts of embedded stuff.” You can also add multiple images, YouTube, Twitter, and Vimeo links to your blogs. However, Telegraph doesn’t let you create a publication — not yet, anyway. What this means is that you don’t have access to an archive of posts, and you can’t edit a post once it’s published or save drafts along the way. All you can really do is publish one post at a time and then share it online using its unique URL.
It’s an interesting concept, which is particularly relevant in our age of impulse sharing, itself fueled by popular messaging apps such as Snapchat. In that sense, it brings the feature closer to a notes platform, best treated as somewhere you can quickly type out your thoughts that can’t be contained in a short message.
Telegram promises that Telegraph log-ins will soon be available, hinting that an expansion could be in the pipeline. Be warned, at present, you’ll find it tricky to find your old posts if you end up deleting them, unless (notes TechCrunch) you have cookies enabled on your browser.
One of the immediate benefits of having a Telegram account for Telegraph users is that your posts will appear as Instant View pages on the app. Announced on Tuesday, the feature is basically the messaging platform’s take on Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages and Facebook’s Instant Articles, offering faster load times for select web articles on mobile devices. Thus far only a handful of publications benefit from Instant View pages, making Telegraph part of that exclusive club is a cool little tie-in for the blogging tool.
Considering that the app is encrypted, you can rest assured that any blog posts you do share will remain anonymous. Alongside the launch of Telegraph, the company also announced a slew of changes to its Android app. Additionally, it claims it has “something big” brewing on the horizon.
