Pavlo Durov announced the stories format in Telegram. What’s next?

How it will be, what it can turn into and how it will affect users, content, channels and advertising.

As for stories, there have been rumors for a long time, especially in the last month. Since there have been no updates for more than two months, although mostly Telegram updates come out with constant regularity every month, this could very well mean a big update that will add global features, as it has happened several times already. In the summer of 2022, when the lull lasts 54 days, a Premium subscription was added, along with a platform for creating static and animated emojis, or in the fall of the same year, when the gap between updates was 50 days, the forums were added. And also quite recently, on June 17, this post was published, after which guesses and hypotheses about the addition of stories gained a firmer foundation.

And so, on June 26, Pavlo Durov writes 3 positions at once in his Telegram channel. In the first, he talks about how their competitors are copying Telegram’s features. But in the second and third posts, he told and showed stories in Telegram.

What Pavlo Durov wrote about stories

It turned out that more than half of all requests to add a new feature to Telegram fell precisely on stories, but “At first we were against it because Stories are already everywhere. However, Telegram wouldn’t be Telegram if we didn’t listen to our users and innovate on existing formats.

That’s why we expect stories to be added to Telegram already at the beginning of July. These stories will have things like:

Privacy. You can choose who can view your stories, you can make them visible to everyone, you can exclude certain people from your contacts who will not be able to see your stories, although they will still be in your contacts, or only selected contacts will be able to see them, and a list of closed friends will also be added (like close friends to Instagram).

Compact interface. Pages won’t take up much space as they will be placed in an expandable section at the top of the chat list.

Flexibility. Other people’s stories can be transferred to hidden sections.

Signatures. In stories, you will be able to leave captions, as well as indicate different places, people and leave links.

Support dual camera. It will be possible to publish photos and videos taken simultaneously by the front and rear cameras (Let’s see how it will look in practice).

Selective life span of stories. You can choose the time that stories will be displayed. It will be 6, 12, 24 or 48 hours, and it will also be possible to pin individual stories forever. And it will be possible to select specific privacy settings for each individual story.

It will also be possible to repost posts from Telegram channels in stories will simplify their development in case of interesting content. During the closed testing of this function, even skeptics began to appreciate it, and they no longer represent Telegram without stories.

How else can this affect Telegram

In connection with such an update, many new users will most likely come to Telegram, especially from Instagram. But there are several aspects now. For example, the fact that nothing was said about the publication of stories on behalf of the channels, probably if they will be added, then not soon, because in this case there will be a lot of spam, advertising and scams for an ordinary user who is subscribed to a large number of channels. Therefore, it will be possible to publish stories only from a personal account. But very few media persons disclose their Telegram account, because a lot of spam pours into the person, although Premium subscription has the function of automatic archiving and disabling of messages in new chats, but it is still not what is in other social networks. Therefore, it should be expected that soon it will be possible to close a person from outsiders in Telegram. Moreover, this functionality has also been requested from the Telegram team for a long time. And until they add the ability to publish stories on behalf of the channel or close the person, the format, cost and possibilities of advertising in Telegram will not change much.

There is also another video from one of the Telegram developers about the stories feature, where you can see how it will look on the PC version.

User opinion

In the Telegram community, opinions on the addition of stories are quite different, with about a third of users happy, and two-thirds not or indifferent.

But if you take into account that when a new function is added to Telegram, they believe that it should be useful for at least 5% of users, and better for 50%. This can be read in their technical support manual.

You can learn more about Telegram in my channel, and if you need help, you can write to the channel group or to me in private, but first try to Google your question or search in “frequently asked questions about Telegram”.

I would like to ask you not to downvote this article if you don’t like the idea of ​​stories in Telegram.

What do you think about this update?