New features and changes to Telegram, Facebook, and Yandex

Publication date: 13 August 2019

Telegram 5.1 brings silent messages, anti-spam feature, and more 

Telegram has been updated with a number of important features that will make communication more comfortable.

• Silent messages

When a user receives a silent message, a notification appears on the lock screen as usual, but the phone makes no sound. This will be useful when you need to send something nonurgent at night and do not want to wake up the recipient. The feature is also available in groups. To send a silent message, enter your text, hold the Send button and choose the “Send without sound” option.

• Fighting against spam

When an admin enables Slow Mode in a group, it restricts how many messages group chat participants can send (e.g. one every minute). A timer will show how long users have to wait before sending their next message.

• Users are able to add a timestamp while sharing a video. Tapping on the timestamp will play the video from the right spot. Videos now also display thumbnail previews to help users find the moment they were looking for.
• Animated Emoji

At the moment, users have a choice of five animated emoji. Sticker Settings offer a toggle for looped playback. When disabled, animated stickers will play just once and then stay still.

• Night theme

Users can choose accent colors for the night theme. It means choosing what color, besides black, messages and interface elements will be highlighted with. 

Facebook to remove interest targets

In the coming months, Facebook will be removing thousands of outdated and infrequently used interest targets such as old movie and band names. The interest targets will be deprecated across all Facebook Ads interfaces, including APIs.

The company reassured that the vast majority of advertisers will not notice these changes.

Interest selection will become easier for advertisers. They will no longer have to wade through so many options.

Turbo pages can be downloaded in Yandex.Webmaster

Users are now able to see the list of their website’s active turbo pages. This feature allows downloading URLs of all pages that use the Turbo technology making it easier to understand which of them should be updated or removed.

Earlier, information about Turbo pages was added to the list of websites and to notifications: the number of Turbo pages, information about problems, autoparsing (if autoparsing is available for the website), or simply a link for turning Turbo pages on (if the website does not use Turbo pages yet).