Telegram messenger has rolled out its biggest update yet, to celebrate its 10th Anniversary. In this update, it has launched Stories – with a unique dual camera mode, granular privacy settings, flexible duration options and much more – for all its users.
On this occasion, Pavel Durov, CEO and Founder of Telegram wrote on his blog, “In just a decade, Telegram gained over 800 million active users purely thanks to word of mouth. Through numerous updates and improvements over the years, Telegram has redefined what a modern messaging experience should be like.
The next step for Telegram is to go beyond messaging and spearhead innovation in social media in general. We should use our popularity to change the lives of billions for better, to inspire and uplift people on our planet.
Today’s gradual roll-out of stories for all users marks the beginning of this new stage in the history of Telegram. While this past decade was exciting, the next 10 years will be the time when Telegram reaches its true potential.”
Telegram Stories for All
Telegram has successfully extended the story feature for all its users on the platform as earlier it was only limited to premium subscribers. This was one of the far most-requested features in the history of Telegram – and the company has spent several months innovating and refining the format. Telegram Stories have all the things a user can expect in terms of utility, ease and innovation.
Stories are displayed in an expandable section at the top of your screen – so users can still see the full length of your chat list and folders. When viewing a story, users can quickly tap to share, reply privately, or react – tap for a quick like reaction or hold down to use hundreds more reactions.
By default, will start seeing stories from all their contacts on their home page. They can also hide stories from specific contacts, sending them to archived chats.
Dual Camera Mode
To capture scenes from every angle, Telegram stories can take photos or videos with both the front and rear camera of the user’s device simultaneously – letting them choose which camera goes where, even while recording.
Stickers, Locations and Captions
Stories use Telegram's powerful media editor – allowing users to add text, drawings, stickers or tag their location. For even more context, stories support captions – where users can include a longer text description, tag friends or add links. Users can also add multiple images from their gallery – or use search to find GIFs and pictures from the web.
Granular Privacy Settings
When users will be posting a story, they can select from 4 privacy settings: Everyone, My Contacts, Close Friends and Selected Contacts. Each option can be completely customized, allowing them to include or exclude any users.
Users on the platform can also select a list of other users who will never see their story. This allows next-level freedom for the users to express themselves better on social media without much hassle. To add the extra element, in order to keep a story even more private, users can disable screenshots to prevent viewers from saving or sharing it.
Stories in Profiles
Stories can last as per the user’s choice of 6, 12, 24 or 48 hours. They can also post them to their profile, arranged in a gorgeous grid — where both old contacts and new connections can see their highlights for as long as they want.
Telegram brought innovation for its users to check out profiles on social media with not only basic details and profile photos but some exciting piece of snapshots from their lives. Each story that users post to their profile has separate privacy settings – so they can always control which ones certain people are able to see.
Editing Stories
For the first time in the history of social media, people can update any element of their story at any time – changing its visibility, caption, on-screen text, stickers or anything else – without having to delete and repost it from scratch. To edit any story, open it on the device they posted it from and tap ⋮ or ⋯ > Edit Story.
Detailed View Statistics
When a user opens a story, they appear in a list of viewers that is visible to the story's author – like a read receipt. After they post a story, users can open it to see the list – which they can filter to show just to their contacts, and sort by recent views first or reactions first. If they want to check if a specific user saw it, they can type their name into the search bar which frees them from scrolling long lists.
For more anonymity, Premium users can enable Stealth Mode – erasing their views from any stories they opened in the past 5 minutes, and hiding what they view for the next 25 minutes.
