Creator Weekly: YouTube Post-Only Feed and Music Video Remix, Sora Text-to-Video, Speaker Spotlight in Slides
This week’s updates include new features for YouTubers, OpenAI’s new text-to-video AI, a better way to create presentation videos in Google Slides and more.
Top news and updates this week
- New YouTube posts-only feed.
- Speaker Spotlight in Google Slides for more engaging presentations
- OpenAI’s Sora, an impressive text-to-video AI model
- Upload YouTube videos and shorts in the YouTube Studio app
- Remix music videos into YouTube Shorts
- Co-stream the Twitch Streamer Awards
- TikTok Creative Assistant in Adobe Express
- Changes to Google Search in the EEA
- Android app photo picker can access images in the cloud
- X’s poor ad performance (maybe bots?)
- A look back at Twitter’s last days
- Pinterest color trends
- Filter your Instagram DMs to only see people you follow
- A look at robots.txt and how it’s not keeping up with technology
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Explore Alvin Ailey and the performing arts on Google Arts & Culture
TikTok: Celebrating Visionary Black Voices
YouTube: 13 standout Black creators you need to follow
A platform for Black voices to shine: How YouTube is celebrating Black History Month
In the Home feed in the YouTube mobile app for Android or iOS, tap “View all posts” to view the Posts feed. In my experience, engaging with a Post on the Home feed (by liking or commenting) makes that button appear.
YouTube says the feed includes “posts from channels that you’ve engaged with before or posts we think you’ll like”.
I’m a fan of posts (check out the quizzes and announcements on my channel), and I’m hoping this gives them more visibility.
Learn more
YouTube Help Center: Interact with creators on Community Posts.
Announcement on Creator Insider on YouTube.
You can add a placeholder to a slide for your video feed, and then when you are in slideshow mode, your camera feed appears there. So you are in your meeting, and people see you talking on the slide itself, rather than in a separate video feed.
A related feature, Slides recordings, became available earlier this month. That lets Google Workspace users record presentations up to 30 minutes from inside Slides. Add Speaker Spotlight to that to create a compelling presentation.
I’m disappointed these features are only available to a limited set of Google Workspace editions (Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Essentials Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, and Education Plus) so I can’t try it out.
Check out the examples. Pretty wow, right?
But tech reporter Brian Merchant points out that it’s important to not be distracted by the hype.
For one thing, Sora generates videos that are very similar to Midjourney for the same prompts, and sometimes very similar to stock videos. Why? Because they use the same content for training the AI model. Plus it’s more likely to be used to replace people in special effects editing and video production than “unleashing creativity”.
Image via Canva. Free for commercial use, no attribution required.
Black History Month
Google Arts & Culture: Celebrating Black History: Past, Present and AfrofuturismExplore Alvin Ailey and the performing arts on Google Arts & Culture
TikTok: Celebrating Visionary Black Voices
YouTube: 13 standout Black creators you need to follow
A platform for Black voices to shine: How YouTube is celebrating Black History Month
YouTube Posts-Only Feed
YouTube has launched a new way to view Community posts in their own feed. Posts can include images, quizzes, polls or links to videos, in addition to text.In the Home feed in the YouTube mobile app for Android or iOS, tap “View all posts” to view the Posts feed. In my experience, engaging with a Post on the Home feed (by liking or commenting) makes that button appear.
YouTube says the feed includes “posts from channels that you’ve engaged with before or posts we think you’ll like”.
I’m a fan of posts (check out the quizzes and announcements on my channel), and I’m hoping this gives them more visibility.
Learn more
YouTube Help Center: Interact with creators on Community Posts.
Announcement on Creator Insider on YouTube.
Speaker Spotlight in Google Slides
Speaker Spotlight is a new feature in Google Slides that lets you insert your Meet meeting video feed into your presentation.You can add a placeholder to a slide for your video feed, and then when you are in slideshow mode, your camera feed appears there. So you are in your meeting, and people see you talking on the slide itself, rather than in a separate video feed.
A related feature, Slides recordings, became available earlier this month. That lets Google Workspace users record presentations up to 30 minutes from inside Slides. Add Speaker Spotlight to that to create a compelling presentation.
I’m disappointed these features are only available to a limited set of Google Workspace editions (Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Essentials Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, and Education Plus) so I can’t try it out.
OpenAI’s New Text-to-Video Model
OpenAI announced Sora, their new text-to-video AI model that can create fairly realistic looking minute-long videos with just a text prompt. This is not available for use -- yet.Today, Sora is becoming available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks. We are also granting access to a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals.
Check out the examples. Pretty wow, right?
But tech reporter Brian Merchant points out that it’s important to not be distracted by the hype.
For one thing, Sora generates videos that are very similar to Midjourney for the same prompts, and sometimes very similar to stock videos. Why? Because they use the same content for training the AI model. Plus it’s more likely to be used to replace people in special effects editing and video production than “unleashing creativity”.
Is this better than Google’s text-to-video model Lumiere?
You be the judge.
If your YouTube channel is eligible for Shopping, and the promotion of products from other brands (not just your own channel merch), you can now tag affiliate products in live streams. This is currently only available to channels in the YouTube Partner Program in the US and South Korea with more than 15,000 subscribers.
You can now Remix music videos into YouTube Shorts. In the YouTube mobile app, look for the Shorts Remix button on your favorite music videos. You can choose to use the sound, “collab” to make a side-by-side video, greenscreen to use it as the video background, or cut a 5 second clip to add to your Short. Other than “clips”, you can use 15 seconds of the music video in the Shorts editor.
Tonight (February 17) is the Twitch Streamer Awards. Viewers can co-stream to share live reactions and watch with their community. Plus there is a special Marvel Snap “quest”.
Adobe Express has a new TikTok Creative Assistant integration. Creative Assistant is TikTok’s AI tool aimed at businesses and brands. It can show what’s trending, give ad examples and provide tips for creating ads. You can try it by going to Adobe Express on desktop (express.adobe.com), starting a new project, then clicking the Add-On option on the left menu. Select TikTok Creative Assistant from the Add-On list.
WordPress has an upcoming free webinar on how to use Block Patterns to design your own theme.
If you are following the trends, Pinterest says this year’s trending color palette is Desert Orange, Gummy Pink, Aqua Blue, Moss Green and Mocha Brown. This is based on actual images and searches on the platform, and they link the colors to specific trends (so Desert Orange is associated with the “Jazz Revival” trend). I find this much more evocative than the Pantone color of the year, which doesn’t really put the color into context of other trends.
Instagram now lets you filter your DMs to only show messages from people you follow.
If you boost your posts on Instagram or Facebook, Meta is recommending that you do that on the Facebook or Instagram website (rather than the app) to avoid Apple’s 30% service charge (which Apple will start charging for in-app boosts later this month). You can pre-pay for boosts on the website, you can then boost from the iOS app without any additional fees.
There are two new Twitter-related books out with available online excerpts:
"Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter's Soul" by Kurt Wagner
From TechCrunch: As Threads deprioritizes politics, Bluesky’s CEO touts custom feeds and user choice in social media
Spoutible is trying to do damage control after a serious data breach, and it’s not a good look.
Comments are one of the most useful collaborative tools in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. Now Google is improving the comment view, so you can see all comments, expand the comments to view with the related content, or minimize comments to just icons.
You can now join a Meet meeting in Companion Mode from your mobile device. If you are in a meeting room with virtual meeting attendees, you can join in Companion Mode to share emoji reactions, raise your hand, turn on captions (including translated subtitles), participate in the in-meeting chat, zoom in on presented content on your device, and be identified in the hybrid meeting by name.
Christian Keil pointed out on X that GitLab’s Zoom meetings posted to YouTube have hundreds of thousands of views, because people are using them to pretend they are in a work call. Just read the comments on one of their videos.
Author Charlie Jane Anders writes: How To Build Your Online "Brand" Without Burning Out
Thanks for reading!
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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 the February 10 edition here.
Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates
You can now upload videos and Shorts in the YouTube Studio mobile app. You can set monetization status in the app as well if your channel is in the YouTube Partner Program. (More from Creator Insider on YouTube)If your YouTube channel is eligible for Shopping, and the promotion of products from other brands (not just your own channel merch), you can now tag affiliate products in live streams. This is currently only available to channels in the YouTube Partner Program in the US and South Korea with more than 15,000 subscribers.
You can now Remix music videos into YouTube Shorts. In the YouTube mobile app, look for the Shorts Remix button on your favorite music videos. You can choose to use the sound, “collab” to make a side-by-side video, greenscreen to use it as the video background, or cut a 5 second clip to add to your Short. Other than “clips”, you can use 15 seconds of the music video in the Shorts editor.
Tonight (February 17) is the Twitch Streamer Awards. Viewers can co-stream to share live reactions and watch with their community. Plus there is a special Marvel Snap “quest”.
Adobe Express has a new TikTok Creative Assistant integration. Creative Assistant is TikTok’s AI tool aimed at businesses and brands. It can show what’s trending, give ad examples and provide tips for creating ads. You can try it by going to Adobe Express on desktop (express.adobe.com), starting a new project, then clicking the Add-On option on the left menu. Select TikTok Creative Assistant from the Add-On list.
Podcasting and Audio
For authors who use Spotify’s Findaway Voices to sell audio books, romance author Courtney Milan pointed out the updated terms of use would give Spotify a royalty-free license to translate the work, generate transcripts and create derivative works. This may be a problem if you want to make exclusive deals for translation or film rights or other uses of your book, or don’t want your book used to train AI tools. Authors who already have those exclusive deals in place, may need to withdraw their books from the platform. After an outcry Spotify rolled back those new terms within a day. It may be that Spotify does not understand how book licensing agreements work, but it also shows how important it is to understand any changes to terms, and speak up if there is a problem.Web Publishers and Search
Business owners and web developers should check out Google’s updated documentation for changes to search coming to users in the European Economic Area.WordPress has an upcoming free webinar on how to use Block Patterns to design your own theme.
Photos and Image Design on the Web
Android developers can now update their app’s photo picker to allow users to access their images in the cloud.This means, for example, being able to select an image that is in your Google Photos library, but not stored on your device. This is available for devices on Android 12 or higher. This is great for Android users!Social Media
The Guardian and Mashable report from advertisers that engagement and supposed traffic from X seems to be massively inflated by bots. Social Media Today takes a closer look. The bottom line: “If you’re noting that your X insights include a lot of clicks and engagement, but you’re not seeing the same reflected in your own analytics and performance data, then it could be that something’s not right, and that X is inflating those figures.”If you are following the trends, Pinterest says this year’s trending color palette is Desert Orange, Gummy Pink, Aqua Blue, Moss Green and Mocha Brown. This is based on actual images and searches on the platform, and they link the colors to specific trends (so Desert Orange is associated with the “Jazz Revival” trend). I find this much more evocative than the Pantone color of the year, which doesn’t really put the color into context of other trends.
Instagram now lets you filter your DMs to only show messages from people you follow.
If you boost your posts on Instagram or Facebook, Meta is recommending that you do that on the Facebook or Instagram website (rather than the app) to avoid Apple’s 30% service charge (which Apple will start charging for in-app boosts later this month). You can pre-pay for boosts on the website, you can then boost from the iOS app without any additional fees.
There are two new Twitter-related books out with available online excerpts:
"Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter's Soul" by Kurt Wagner
- A behind-the-scenes look at the Twitter company retreat that brought Jack Dorsey out of his shell (Business Insider)
- Elon Musk attacked my article accusing him of gaming Twitter's algorithm for more attention. In some ways, it gave him exactly what he wanted. (Business Insider)
- The Story Behind Elon Musk’s Tweet Restriction Fiasco (Wired)
From TechCrunch: As Threads deprioritizes politics, Bluesky’s CEO touts custom feeds and user choice in social media
Spoutible is trying to do damage control after a serious data breach, and it’s not a good look.
More AI Updates
Google released Gemini 1.5 with “dramatically enhanced performance”. One of its big improvements is its long context model, or “how many tokens — the smallest building blocks, like part of a word, image or video — that the model can process at once”. The latest model increases the number of tokens it can process from 32,000 to up to 1 million tokens. Gemini 1.5 Pro is in limited preview for developers.Communication and Collaboration
You can now drag and drop an image to replace the background in Google Slides.Comments are one of the most useful collaborative tools in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. Now Google is improving the comment view, so you can see all comments, expand the comments to view with the related content, or minimize comments to just icons.
You can now join a Meet meeting in Companion Mode from your mobile device. If you are in a meeting room with virtual meeting attendees, you can join in Companion Mode to share emoji reactions, raise your hand, turn on captions (including translated subtitles), participate in the in-meeting chat, zoom in on presented content on your device, and be identified in the hybrid meeting by name.
More Reading
Read this! David Pierce @ The Verge writes about The text file that runs the internet: “For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.”Christian Keil pointed out on X that GitLab’s Zoom meetings posted to YouTube have hundreds of thousands of views, because people are using them to pretend they are in a work call. Just read the comments on one of their videos.
Author Charlie Jane Anders writes: How To Build Your Online "Brand" Without Burning Out
Thanks for reading!
---
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 the February 10 edition here.
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