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Weekly Update - June 20, 2020: Meet, Duo, Keen

In this week’s updates, you can use Duo for group video calls on the web, use Meet in the mobile Gmail app, share your passions in Keen, and get tips and updates for YouTubers, map makers and more.

YouTube and Video

Communicate

Sites and Ads

Social

  • Area 120, Google’s experimental project division, has launched Keen, a site for collecting and sharing content about the “long term interests” you are passionate about. All you need to do is sign in, create a new Keen, and start adding content, including links, text,and photos. Keens can be public or private. What makes it more than just another blogging platform or Pinterest clone is that the Community can suggest content to add to your Keen. And Keen uses Google Search and machine learning to suggest content as well. Check out this Keen about Keen, and give it a try. Just remember that it’s an experiment, and may not be around in the long term.
  • Twitter launched “voice Tweets”, an experiment that let people record and post an audio clip. This immediately came under fire for lacking captions or transcriptions, making the audio tweets inaccessible to the hard of hearing (and anyone else who peruses Twitter with the volume turned down). Plus the implementation did not work with screen readers, preventing the visually impaired from listening to the recordings. Perhaps not too surprisingly, it was also revealed that Twitter does not have a team dedicated to accessibility, and just relies on a volunteer group of employees who work on that in their spare time. Twitter apologized, and says they are exploring ways to improve accessibility.

More

Upcoming

  • On Sunday, June 21, OnEBoard premieres a tutorial on how to optimally share images on Twitter. It's not too long, and we would love folks to watch live and chat. Watch it here.
  • Like most conferences this year VidCon has moved online, with sessions and workshops from June 20 to July 2. Registration is free, but spaces in the sessions are limited. Discussion has
  • Google Cloud is hosting a global, 24-hour event as part of their new Google Cloud Talks by DevRel Series. “This event for enterprise practitioners, developers and IT professionals will deliver live, deep technical content, q&a and demos.” It begins June 22 at 5:00 PM Pacific Time (June 23 at 00:00 UTC).
  • Search Engine Land’s SMX Next is a free online conference for everyone interested in “tech driven search marketing” on June 23-24.
That’s all the updates for this week. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your email inbox or favorite feed reader every week. Miss last week’s update? Get it here.

Image: Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Sun by Pixabay on Pexels. Free to use.

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