Weekly Update - June 29, 2019: YouTube, Image Search, FeedBurner

We Americans celebrate our Independence Day on July 4th, and many folks have already started their holiday. Perhaps that’s why YouTube made several big announcements this week. There were also updates for FeedBurner, public transit info in Google Maps and more. And if you are in the US have a safe holiday!

This week YouTube announced major improvements in recommendations on the YouTube homepage and “up next”: You can now explore specific topics and related videos, completely remove recommendations from channels you don’t watch (and don’t want to watch), and see more information about why a video was recommended to you. Note that the option to choose topics based on what you watch is currently available in English on Android, but it will be “coming soon” to more languages and devices. For more information about how recommendations work, go behind the scenes with Team YouTube.
YouTube also announced they will be gradually rolling out a new default in comment settings: all “potentially inappropriate” comments will be held for review. You can choose to moderate those comments, or not. For more details, check out the FAQ. It may take a few months for the new default to arrive on your channel. In the mean time you can enable the setting manually.
YouTube has expanded the information about the Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines for YouTube Partners to include more examples of what is not allowed. This is not a change in policy, it’s just more details about current policy. If you are a YouTube Partner be sure to check it out.
FeedBurner has deprecated the “MyBrand” service. After July 31, 2019 you will not be able to add a new domain. Existing domains will continue to work. FeedBurner is Google’s service that lets you customize and promote the RSS feed for your blog, including letting people sign up for email updates. When you let your Blogger readers subscribe to updates by email, that’s FeedBurner working behind the scenes. The “My Brand” option let users set up a custom domain link to point to their FeedBurner feed link.
Patreon now has a page with resources for it’s “18+ creators”, that is, creators who make content for people aged 18 and older.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine now has a “Changes” tab (in beta) that lets you easily see how the content on a specific URL has changed over time. That means you can see what’s been added and deleted. For example this is how the post I have pinned to the top of my home page changed between June 2017 and March 2019.
Is Google now trying to compete with GIPHY? Google Images on mobile now has a “Share GIFs” section that lets you share GIFs directly into different apps, including Gmail, Hangouts, Android Messages and Whatsapp. If you are a GIF creator, you can get your GIFs included in those results by uploading them to Google-owned Tenor.com, or you can connect with Google’s partnership team via this form.
Google Maps is adding information that will let you know how bad (or good) your trip across town will be. They are adding live traffic delays for buses in places they don’t get real-time information from transit agencies, which means you should be able to see if your bus will be late. They are also adding crowdedness predictions for bus, train or subway in nearly 200 cities around the world. Google has analyzed that data to find the world’s most crowded transit lines - Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Tokyo are the “winners”.