Telegram launches Telegraph to let you publish articles anonymously

Messaging platform Telegram has launched Telegraph, a new tool for publishing stories on the Web without having to register for an account.

It’s like the most lightweight blogging platform ever. Just visit telegra.ph, add a title and your name, and you’re off. You can add text and format it with Markdown, and even embed images from your computer, as well as tweets and videos from YouTube and Vimeo.

Sharing your post is as simple as hitting ‘Publish’ and then posting the URL to social networks or sending it to your contacts via mail and messaging platforms. You can edit your post as long as your current browser session is active.

Because there’s no registration, you can’t create a profile and collate your posts. There isn’t even a comments section for each article. That may make Telegraph a good choice for quickly publishing content, but it also opens up the possibility of people impersonating others just by using their names in the byline.

Telegraph plays nice with Instant View, a new feature within Telegram to quickly launch stories from Medium and a growing list of other sites. It’s similar to Facebook’s Instant Articles and Google’s AMP, with a view to deliver content from around the Web within the messaging app with minimal load times.

Telegraph’s mobile experience could use some work, though: After writing an article, I couldn’t figure out how to grab the URL for my post.

The company recently updated its mobile messaging app with bot-powered games; the latest version adds handy features like a calendar search for individual messages and a way to track down group chats whose names you can’t remember, by looking up other users from those conversations. Telegram also noted that “Something big is brewing” in its “secret dungeons”, which it will likely reveal in the near future.

It’s too early to say if people will take to Telegraph, but it does seem like an interesting alternative to publishing lengthy tweetstorms and status updates. Try it out by visiting this page and share links to your posts in the comments.