Weekly Update - April 18, 2020: Meet, YouTube, Business Tools

Earth Day is this coming week, and has mostly moved online. That seems fitting, as pollution drops and more animals are seen in cities, while most of us humans are staying home. This week there are improvements in Google Meet and other online communication tools, new YouTube Smart Replies, free tools to help small businesses promote themselves and more.

Communicate

• If you are a G Suite user, there are new features coming to Google Meet. The option to start or join a Meet meeting directly from Gmail is rolling out. And coming “later this month” are a new up-to-16-person grid layout, improved video quality and filtered background noise. The public conferencing platform of the moment is Zoom, and while these changes are “Zoom like”, Meet’s limitation to businesses and schools means less widespread adoption.
• Zoom is adding new meeting password options and creating less-guessable longer meeting IDs to keep meetings more secure.
• Discord is bringing noise suppression technology to voice chat.
• Microsoft Teams now lets you create Tags to organize users within your Team.
• Adobe offers Team Projects to Premiere Pro and After Effects users with a Creative Cloud Individual License Through August 17

Video and Live Streaming

• YouTube is rolling out Smart Replies to English-language channels. Smart replies make it quicker and easier to respond to people who comment on your videos. You can edit before the comment is posted to personalize it.
• Classic YouTube Studio will be going away at the end of April. Now is the time to learn how to use the new Studio!
• YouTube has added a destination button on the Explore tab for content from creators participating in the #StayHome #WithMe campaign.
• YouTube Giving is now available to more creators in the US, UK and Canada. If your channel is eligible, you can run a fundraiser for US nonprofits. One of the requirements is 500,000 subscribers, so I’m not going to be doing this any time soon on my channel.
• You can now watch Instagram live streams on desktop.
• Lightstream Studio has a tutorial for live streaming musical performances.Lightstream Studio’s “free trial” plan lets you live stream up to 4 hours per month.

At home learning

• If you use an Android device, Google has made it easy to find teacher-approved kid-friendly apps and fitness and wellness apps.
• Here are some tips for learning at home using Google Earth.

Tools for Businesses

• Shutterstock is offering free images, videos, music and virtual backgrounds for conference calls on their COVID-19 resource page.
• Facebook has tips and free images for small businesses who want to effectively communicate with their customers in these “difficult” times.
• Instagram is helping to support small businesses by making it easier to discover gift cards, online food orders, and fundraisers with new stickers.
• If you are, trying to get your business on Google Maps, check out Online Ownership’s verification FAQ for Google My Business.

That’s all the updates for this week. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your email inbox or favorite feed reader every week. Miss last week’s update? Get it here.

Image: Wednesday, April 22 is Earth Day. We’re all in this together! Earth Night Lights by WikiImages on Pixabay. Free for commercial use.