Weekly Update - February 8, 2020: Maps, Elections, Oscars

This week Google Maps turned 15, and got a new logo and updated features. YouTube and Google announced the election-year steps they are taking to help political candidates and journalists, and to prevent the spread of misinformation. You can have some fun with the Academy Awards on Sunday. Plus there are updates for YouTubers, webmasters, and more.

If you go by YouTube trailer views, Joker will win for Best Picture at the Oscars, with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and 1917 as runner-ups.
Tenor, Google’s visual expression search engine, will be capturing the Oscars in GIF form. To find and share Academy Award GIFs, search #oscars on Tenor in the GIF Keyboard app (iOS), the Gboard Keyboard (Android), or visit the official Oscars page on Tenor. Check out all the Google Search and Assistant Oscar goodies.
Google Maps turned 15 this week. To celebrate there’s new logo, updated mobile app with improved navigation, and they are adding new public transit information including accessibility, security, and even temperature. You can also check out Street Views favorite Street Views and Sundar Pichai’s favorite burrito places around the world.
Looking to the future, Google Maps team lead Jen Fitzpatrick emphasizes that they are not turning Maps into a messaging app or social network. Instead features like messaging a business, sharing your location, are for “trying to help you get the things done that you're trying to get done.” Maps doesn’t need to know your whole social network to do that. As for what they are working on, Maps is looking towards improving navigation, especially when using different modes of travel and adding new features to the Explore tab.
A small percentage of YouTube channels now see top commenters in YouTube Studio. On the Comments page in Studio, Top Commenters and Subscribers will have a special badge next to their name. Sounds neat.
YouTube announced that the old desktop interface will be going away in March. If this affects you, you’ll see a notification. The current desktop version launched in 2017, so odds are you won’t have to make any changes unless you are using an old browser that doesn’t support it.
DEMAND is a new app from Google’s Area 120 with data and analytics for music artists, including artist trends, ticket pricing and on-sale announcement effectiveness. It’s aimed at rising artists, marketers, media bookers and even fans.
Reddit now has 1:1 chat and subreddit chat rooms.
Chrome will stop showing “disruptive” ads on short videos, following the lead of the Coalition for Better Ads. That doesn’t mean all ads will go away, but rather just the most intrusive ones on videos up to 8 minutes long, including mid-roll ads, long non-skippable pre-roll ads, and overlay ads that cover more than 20% of the video content. YouTube isn’t exempt, but its current ads appear to already comply with those guidelines. This change will go into effect on August 5.
To improve security when you are surfing the web, Chrome is making changes so that secure HTTPS pages will only download secure files. It will start off with warnings in Chrome 82, and gradually block more types of secure content, starting with Executable files (for example .exe and .apk files). Starting with Chrome 86, to be released in October 2020, all types of mixed content will be blocked, including images, audio, video and text files. What that means is that you should check your blog or website to make sure all downloads only use HTTPS, especially on your older web pages.
With the start of the US Presidential Primaries, Google has shared what actions it’s taking to prevent election-related abuse. They have launched the Protect Your Election site with free tools and resources to help protect politicians, campaigns and journalists from digital attacks. Twitter and Pinterest also posted policies this week relating to manipulated content and election-related abuse.
YouTube has also explained in more detail how their policies apply to election-related content. Misleading and manipulated content about voting and candidates is prohibited. They are also promoting content from authoritative sources and the candidates’ own channels, and politicians, commentators, and news publishers can get additional support from YouTube. None of this is new, but rather policy changes and features that YouTube has been implementing over the past few years.

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Image: 1918 AAA General Map of US Transcontinental Routes (Public Domain)

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