Peggy K's Creator News

Monday is Memorial Day in the US, a day for remembering the people who died while serving in the US armed forces, and barbecuing. Start your holiday weekend with some nice updates and be glad the flood of GDPR-related privacy updates should be down to a trickle. You can now “give some love” by ❤️ing photos shared with you in Google Photos, and ⭐ your favorite photos to add them to a special “Favorites” album.  Google Lens got a bit smarter, with real-time search and smart text selection. This week YouTube mentioned they had been testing algorithmic sorting of the subscription feed, and they got an earful of (mostly negative) feedback.  Business owners are regularly targeted by companies claim to represent Google, promising high search result rankings or charging money for Google’s free services. This week Google took legal action against some of the scammers, and rolled out new tools for businesses, including a way to report scammy practices and policy violations, and a...

This week some of the new product features announced at Google I/O are starting to roll out. But not to be outdone, there were big updates from YouTube, Google Drive and Blogger. Read on for details. YouTube announced two new subscription services that replace YouTube Red: a new improved YouTube Music (which was originally launched in 2015 ) and the new YouTube Premium. Currently a YouTube Red subscription gets you both Google Play Music, plus ad-free, background and offline video watching and YouTube Originals. Under the new plans a Google Play Music or YouTube Music Premium subscription will get you organized and personalized music, plus the revamped YouTube Music app and website. A YouTube Premium subscription will cost $2 more per month, and will additionally include access to the ad free and offline videos and YouTube Originalis. Availability will expand from the five countries where YouTube Red is currently available to 19 countries. Note that if you are a current Google Play...

This week was the Google I/O annual developer conference, where Google announces new products and major updates. There were two big themes: artificial intelligence (and Google Assistant) and machine learning everywhere, plus a new focus on “wellbeing”, with new tools to help users make sure that technology is not “detracting from life”. There are links to all the news and updates below, but for a general overview see the list of “ 100 things Google announced at I/O ‘18” . The Google Assistant is speaking “more naturally” , with six new voices (including John Legend), the ability to mimic the subtleties of human speech, and “Continue Conversations”, so you don’t need to say “Hey Google” every time. The culmination is Google Duplex, which will be tested starting this summer. Duplex allows the Google Assistant to make phone calls on your behalf to businesses to set appoints or check open hours. The announcement has created a fair amount of controversy, with people uncomfortable wi...

This week was Facebook’s F8 developer conference, with a whole bunch of new features announced for the Facebook Platform, Instagram, and WhatsApp. There weren’t many updates in the Googleverse, but stay tuned for announcements from Google I/O in the coming week. YouTube wooed advertisers at its Brandcast NewFronts event , announcing four new YouTube Originals shows and touting last year’s successes. There are also new advertising opportunities, with more music and originals in “Google Preferred” and TV advertising options .  AdSense has changed the way it counts impressions - instead of “served impressions”, counted when the ad is requested on the server, it’s now counting “downloaded impressions”, counted when the ad downloads for the viewer. Publishers may see reported impressions decrease, and click through rate increase.  There were several Google Assistant updates this week, presumably setting the stage for more announcements at next week’s Google I/O develop...