Telegram Founder and CEO Pavel Durov on Tuesday announced that the instant messaging service will launch a new feature called “Stories” starting early next month.
The “Stories” feature, which was first introduced by Snapchat in 2013, later went on to get largely popularized by Meta-owned social media apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Telegram To Add “Stories” Feature To Its App In July
Announcing the feature on his Telegram channel, Durov says users have been asking to implement Stories in Telegram for years, noting that more than half of all feature requests received by the platform are related to Stories. Hence, the company decided to launch its own version of Stories.
“For years, our users have been asking us to implement Stories in Telegram. Initially, we were against this since Stories are already everywhere. However, Telegram wouldn’t be Telegram if we didn’t listen to our users and didn’t innovate on existing formats,” he said.
The upcoming Stories feature on Telegram will allow users to have control over who can see their stories with ‘granular precision’: Everyone, only your contacts (with exceptions), a few selected contacts, or a list of Close Friends.
Further, Stories will be placed in an expandable section at the top of the chat list, which makes them easily accessible without taking away valuable space.
In addition, Telegram will allow users to easily hide Stories posted by any contact by moving them to the ‘Hidden’ list in their Contacts section instead of the main screen.
Besides using a range of photo and video-editing tools, Telegram users will be able to provide captions for their stories to add more context or links and tag other people. They can also post photos and videos taken by the front and the rear cameras simultaneously.
Lastly, Telegram is adding an ephemeral setting that lets users choose when a story should expire – in 6, 12, 24, or 48 hours. They can also pin it to their profile to permanently display stories on their profile page, with individual privacy settings for each.
“The ability to save your stories to the profile page will make Telegram profiles more informative and colorful,” Durov added.
“You will not only be able to explore more content from your closest contacts but finally discover more information about users you connect with in groups or channel comments. Speaking of channels, they will benefit from more exposure and subscribers: once we launch the ability to repost messages from channels to stories, going viral on Telegram will become a lot easier.”
Currently, the “Stories” feature in Telegram is in its last testing phase and is expected to become available in early July. Durov believes the feature will “herald a new era on Telegram, where it will become even more fun and social than it currently is.”
