Memorial Day weekend in the US is meant to honor those who died in military service, and is the unofficial beginning of summer. It usually leans more towards barbeques than quiet reflection. But that may be why this week it’s less a flood of updates than a trickle.
- Google Duo, Google’s consumer video calling platform, now offers end-to-end encrypted group video calls with up to 8 people, the ability to send personalized video messages with text and emoji, and data-saving mode in select countries including India, Indonesia and Brazil. Maybe they will change the name from “Duo” to “Octo”.
- Google Search results on mobile are getting a new look. The name of the website and its favicon appear more prominently at the top of each result, and ads will have a bolder “Ad” label. Check out the difference.
- You can now order food directly from Google Maps, Search and Assistant. For participating restaurants you can either order food for pickup or delivery with just a few taps. Delivery uses services like DoorDash, Postmates, Delivery.com, Slice, and ChowNow, but you don’t have to set up an account with those services. None of the places I usually order food from have this option, so there may not be many participating restaurants yet. Naab Mediterranean in Encino, California is shown in the announcement, and you can check their listing to see what the Order Online button looks like.
- YouTube announced that in August they will stop publicly displaying exact subscriber counts. If your channel has more than 1000 subscribers, the number will be rounded down: 4227 subs will show as 4.2k, 133,027 subs will show as 133k, and 51,389,232 subs will show as 51M. You’ll still be able to see your own channel’s exact number of subscribers in YouTube Studio. Importantly, third party sites that display data from YouTube will also only get the rounded subscriber numbers. That likely means that Social Blade’s popular live subscriber counts - watched both by excited creators nearing a milestone and by gawkers of the latest YouTube drama - will be no more.
- Instagram’s IGTV now supports landscape videos. While vertical video works nicely for vlogs and “up close and personal” videos, Instagram notes that sometimes landscape is better, for example for dance, sports, or when multiple people are in the frame.
- Adobe’s Premiere Rush, multi-platform simplified video editing software for creating content to post to social media and YouTube is now available for Android devices. You can export up to 3 projects for free, but for more than that it’s $9.99 per month. It’s also available as part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud plans.
- Google Glass is back! The Glass team has moved from X (Alphabet’s “Moonshot factory”) to Google and Glass Enterprise Edition 2 is available with a more powerful processor, improved camera quality and can be ordered with safety frames, a requirement in some environments. This isn’t aimed at techies, instead this is designed for manufacturing, logistics and service industries.
- Google announced new Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants for “contemporary artists exploring creative applications of machine learning. This program will offer artists engineering mentorship, access to core Google research, and project funding.”
- There’s a lot of buzz this week about Playdate, a cute new hand-cranked handheld gaming system that will ship in early 2020. It has a black and white screen, and comes with a “season” of 12 games. There are already 70,000 people on the waitlist.
- Chinese phone maker Huawei may be in trouble, as it’s addition to the US restricted Entity list prohibits US companies from doing business with them. It’s not just the loss of Google services and Play Store on their Android devices, but also that chip manufacturers like Intel, Qualcomm, and Broadcom will stop supplying hardware components and they may not even be able to use Bluetooth in their devices. In the first quarter of 2019, Huawei’s globalsmartphone market share was second only to Samsung.
Image: Cherries are finally in season, bringing the flavor of summer. Image by Ilona Frey from Pixabay
Upcoming
- May 28: Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangout
- May 30: YouTube Gaming app stops working
- May 31: Google Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangout
- June 4: Google Partners Academy on Air: 3 simple strategies to enhance your search ads
- June 7: Deadline for Change the Game design challenge for teens
YouTube and Video Creation
- Early heads up: abbreviated public subscriber counts across YouTube (YouTube)
- Meet the man with an impossible job: cleaning up YouTube (Vox)
- Abbreviated Public Subscriber Count, Personalized Overview in YTA, and YT Gaming App Deprecation! (Creator Insider)
- How to Tag Your Location on Videos & Live Streams (YouTube Creators)
- Why some videos include song information in the description (TeamYouTube)
- Marketing Live 2019: Unlocking new forms of video storytelling with bumper machine on YouTube (Google Ads)
- My video went viral. Here’s why. (Veritasium)
- Adobe Expands Premiere Rush to Android Devices (Adobe)
Social Media: Facebook and Instagram
- Facebook Transparency Report (Facebook)
- How Does Facebook Measure Fake Accounts? (Facebook)
- An Update on How We Are Doing At Enforcing Our Community Standards (Facebook)
- Measuring Prevalence of Violating Content on Facebook (Facebook)
- IGTV Now Supports Landscape Videos (Instagram)
- Instagram will soon let you appeal post takedowns (Engadget)
- How Facebook is designing for an incoming avalanche of dead users (Fast Company)
- Private data (including rates) of 49M Instagram influencers leaked due to agency’s malpractice (The Next Web)
Social Media: Twitter
Google Photos and Photo Sharing
- Moving Camera, Moving People: A Deep Learning Approach to Depth Prediction (Google AI Research)
Bloggers and Webmasters
- A new look for Google Search on mobile (Google)
- Googlebot: SEO Mythbusting (Google Webmasters)
AdSense and Advertising
- Understanding AdSense Policy: How to Request a Review (AdSense)
- Marketing Live 2019: Unlocking new forms of video storytelling with bumper machine on YouTube (Google Ads)
Hangouts, Meetings and Messaging
Made by Google, Android, Google Fi
- Glass Enterprise Edition 2: faster and more helpful (Google)
- Google announces finalists of the Indie Games Showcase from Google Play (Android Developers)
- Bose speakers get smarter with the Google Assistant (Google)
Productivity
- Dark mode available for Calendar and Keep on Android (G Suite Updates)
- Update all linked content with one click in Docs and Slides (G Suite Updates)
- Your commute just got easier with Google Pay and the Assistant (Google)
- Order dinner from Maps and Search with Google (Google)
- Stable Channel Update for Desktop: Chrome 74 (Chrome Releases)
More around the web
- The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones (Zeynep Tufekci)
- A promising step forward for predicting lung cancer (Google)
- Check out “Dance Like,” a fun ML-driven app from Google (John Nack)
- The Story of Mathematica’s Spike (Stephen Wolfram Blog)
- New Assange indictment adds 17 espionage charges (Ars Technica)
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