Weekly Update - March 16, 2019: Google+, YouTube, Google Ads

Happy St. Patrick’s Day (almost)! This week there are updates for Plussers, YouTube Music fans, webmasters, ad publishers and more.

This week there is a new reminder from Google+ to start the download of your content in Google Takeout by March 31 to be sure it’s archived before April 2nd. Do it!
You can now download a copy of the posts from public Google+ Communities you own or moderate. Select which Google+ Communities you want to archive in Google Takeout. And if you do that, be mindful that your community members may not want their content posted anywhere outside of Google+, so ask them permission before you repost anywhere.
Google+ custom URLs now redirect to a link with the user’s 21-digit user ID. After consumer Google+ shuts down, the vanity URL will no longer work, including in links to Album Archive. Note that your YouTube custom URL will not be affected.
MeWe now has a Google+ data importer. I have some questions about how it works, and I’ll share when I get answers.
Also, there is a project to assist the archiving of public Google+ content for the Internet Archive. If you want to get involved, learn more here.
YouTube is using Google’s Augmented Faces API to add animated masks, glasses, 3D hats and more to your video selfies in Stories. Light reflections and shadows help make it look realistic. It looks like a vast improvement on the old Hangouts video call Effects, which were ahead of their time. Stories is currently available to channels with at least 10,000 subscribers.
YouTube Music is now available in India, , South Africa, Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Uruguay, Panama, Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Bolivia.
In Hangouts Meet you can now present while keeping your camera’s video feed visible. Hangouts Meet calls can currently only be set up by G Suite users.
Will it be quiche? Quince? Queso? Quaaludes? Android Q beta is now available. If you are willing to brave the inevitable early version errors and glitches you can enroll your Pixel device. Provide feedback and discuss features in the official Android Beta Reddit Community.
Google is rolling “end-to-end, all-neural, on-device speech recognizer to power speech input” in Gboard. It will be available even when you are offline. This first launch is for Pixel phones using American English.
Blogging platform Medium uses human curation to recommend stories to readers. They have announced two changes: more recommended stories will be behind Medium’s paywall, but authors will be provided a “Friend Link” they can share that bypasses the paywall. If the author is part of the Medium Partner Program program, they can earn from their story as well.
Blogger blog RSS feeds now only include 100 entries, but there are work-arounds to get more items.
Google reports that in 2018 Google Ads took down 2.3 billion “bad ads” and terminated 730k AdSense and AdMob publisher accounts. They also verified 143,000 election ads in the U.S. and launched a new political ads transparency report . Similar tools will be launched this year for elections in the EU and India. In April advertisers will have access to a new Policy Center in their Google Ads account, to help them stay up-to-day and compliant with all the rules.
The Google Drive mobile app for Android and iOS is getting a Material design makeover, with improved navigation and search.
Google has two new products to help the visually impaired. Lookout is a new app that can use your phone’s camera to tell you about about people, text, and objects as you move through a space. The Be My Eyes app connects people who are blind or have low vision with live volunteers who will assist with tasks like “checking expiry dates, distinguishing colors, reading instructions or navigating new surroundings.” Both are currently only available in English.
Facebook - along with Instagram and WhatsApp (which are also Facebook) - was down for most of the day on March 13th. Facebook said it was due to a “server configuration change”. The world did not end, but Twitter seemed noisier than usual.
Next week is the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. Google is teasing a big Games-related announcement at 10AM PDT on March 19th, which you can watch live. You can also get a preview will be presented by Google Ads, AdMob , Google Maps, Google Play. And, of course, Twitch will be there too.

The horrific mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand this week has highlighted how unprepared social media platforms are for terror attacks “designed to spread on social media”

Click the link below for more Read on for more links, tips and updates for Plussers, webmasters, chatters and more.
Image: St. Patrick’s day is Sunday, March 17th. We’ve had plenty of rain here in California, so the grass on the hills are green, and shady areas have great patches of oxalis (wood sorrell), the closest we have to shamrocks. Photo by me.

Upcoming

March 18-22: San Francisco Game Developer Conference. There will be a big gaming announcement from Google on March 19, which you can watch live. Preview of what will be presented by Google Ads, AdMob , Google Maps, Google Play,
March 19: Google Webmasters office hours Hangout
March 21: Google Partners Academy on Air: Fundamentals of app promotion
March 22: Google Webmasters office hours Hangout

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