Weekly Update - February 22, 2020: Policy, Google Terms of Service, YouTube

This week Google announced an update to their Terms of Service, detailed how they dealt with policy-violating apps in the Play Store and bad content on Maps, and there are new YouTube features being tested. Plus there are updates for webmasters, bloggers, business owners and more.

Google is updating their Terms of Service, to take effect March 31st. You can get an overview of the changes, which seem to mostly be a rewrite to make the existing terms more understandable. Chrome, Chrome OS, and Google Drive are also now covered in the terms. See the FAQ for more details. The exact terms will vary depending on where you are located and your language, so watch for an email from Google with links to the terms that apply to you. Notably, it’s been reported that British users will be moved from Irish jurisdiction to US jurisdiction, due to Brexit, with possible changes in privacy terms for those users.
YouTube Playlists will now be private by default. If you want a new Playlist to be public, you will have to make a few additional clicks to change that setting.
YouTube is testing a feature that lets you schedule Community posts on desktop. If your channel is in this test, be sure to send YouTube feedback.
YouTube is expanding monetization self-certification to more Partners. Self certification gives Partners the ability to answer questions about their content during the upload process to determine if it’s advertiser friendly. As long as you accurately answer questions about your video, YouTube will “start to rely on your inputs more and more over time.” If you get it wrong, you will get more detailed feedback from reviewers than just a yellow $. This will be available to all monetizing creators in the next few months.
As a YouTube Partner you are expected to understand what policies apply to you. YouTube is trying to help creators do that.They have updated the advertiser friendly guidelines to provide more examples of what are considered “controversial issues” and “sensitive events”.
If you have had your application for the YouTube Partner Program rejected for “repetitious” or “reused” content, Creator Insider gives some insight into what that means exactly.
AdSense has been posting informative videos on their official YouTube channel. Learn how to get your site approved and all about how to make sure you can receive your AdSense payment.
Live streaming platform Lightstream Studio announced new paid plans. There is still a free tier, that lets you stream for 4 hours per month to Facebook, YouTube, Twitch & Mixer, with up to one remote guest.
Adobe Photoshop turned 30 this week, and celebrated with new features for desktop and iPad.
Facebook launches Creator Studio mobile app where you can get "actionable insights and meaningful engagement metrics", manage your Page posts, edit video titles and descriptions, and respond to messages and comments.
You may have noticed Blogger’s built-in spell checker has disappeared.That’s not a bug - it’s been removed, and Blogger encourages users to use browser-based spell checkers instead.
If you are blogging with Blogger, and are considering setting up a custom domain, check out this video tutorial on how to publish your blogspot address to a custom domain from my fellow Blogger Product expert Krishna.
Businesses only spend money purchasing Google Ads if they think they will get a return on their investment. Invalid activity on the ads and poor user experience are bad for advertisers and publishers. To help fight ad fraud, Google has developed machine-learning algorithms that help detect when apps show out-of-context ads, which lead to the removal of 600 apps from the Google Play store and a ban from using Google’s ads for violating “disruptive ads” policies. And in 2019 Google removed tens of thousands of apps and developers from the Play Store and its advertising platforms for violating policy.
There are frequent complaints about the presence of spam on Google Maps, but Google actually does remove a lot of bad content. According to the latest overview they removed more than 75 million policy-violating reviews, 4 million fake business profiles, 10 million policy-violating photos, 3 million policy-violating videos and almost 500k user accounts in 2019, mostly using automated detection.
Your translation history in Google Translate will soon only be viewable and managed in your Google Account’s My Activity. When this change happens, your current history will be cleared, so be sure to save translations you want to access in the future.
Gmail is getting what Google calls “search chips”, which let you easily refine your search results.It looks quite useful, and lets you use Gmail's more powerful search options without having to know all the different search parameters.
If you use a G Suite account - a Google account for work- it’s now easier to write in Google Docs with “smart compose” and autocorrect for the web. It’s like you almost don’t have to write at all! These are not available for G Suite for Education or consumer accounts.
Finally, Larry Tesler died this week. He may not be a household name, but his contributions are familiar to anyone who has used a computer: he’s the father of “cut”, “copy” and “paste” and more user-friendly interfaces.
Read on for additional tips and updates for video creators, webmasters, business owners and more.

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Image: Colorful feathers by amritsangeet0 on Pixabay. Free for commercial use.
February 20-25 is Carnival, the festive pre-Lent period that in some countries includes parades with participants brilliantly costumed with feathers and sequins.You can get updates about Carnaval 2020 in Google News. Do a search for Carnaval and you will get a special page in Brazilian Portuguese with breaking news, information on parade routes and lineups, costume tips and public safety resources.

Other Social Media

Google for Businesses

[New Feature] Google Posts with Multiple Images (Local University)
Google Maps 101: how contributed content makes a more helpful map (Google)

Bloggers and Webmasters

Tip:Blogger HTTPS for custom domain and Cloudflare (How to Blog)
Tip: How to publish your blogspot address to a custom domain (Kesava Krishnan)
Announcing the new Bing Webmaster Tools (Bing)
Webspam manual actions and reconsideration requests #AskGoogleWebmasters (Google Webmasters)
English Google Webmaster Central office-hours from February 18, 2020 (Google Webmasters)
English Google Webmaster Central office-hours from February 21, 2020 (Google Webmasters)

AdSense and Advertising

Disruptive ads enforcement and our new approach (Google Online Security Blog)

Made by Google, Android, Google Fi

Turning it up to 11: the first Developer Preview of Android 11 (Android Developers)
Protecting the mobile app ecosystem (AdMob)
Ambient IQ: How Google Nest speakers work (Google Nest Community)

Chrome

Chrome for Android Update (Chrome Releases)
Stable Channel Update for Desktop v. 80 (Chrome Releases)

Productivity

Refine search results in Gmail faster with search chips (G Suite Updates)
Smart Compose in Google Docs now generally available (G Suite Updates)
Autocorrect now available for Google Docs on web (G Suite Updates)
Feedly’s 25 Keyboard Shortcuts (Feedly)

More around the web

HQ, maker of the once-popular HQ Trivia, is shutting down (The Verge)
Google winds down free Station Wi-Fi program (The Verge

Peggy K's Creator News

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