Weekly Update - June 13, 2020: Android 11, YouTube, Meet

As protests continue around the US, more companies are announcing new features, policies and fundraisers to promote Black voices and racial justice. And technology moves on, with the launch of Android 11 beta, new features in YouTube, AdSense, Google Meet, Docs and more.

• Android 11 beta was released. It has new messaging notifications, privacy features, built in screen recording, improved voice access and other features. For more information, check out the Android Central and Android Police overviews, and the Android Developers presentations on YouTube. If you have a Pixel 2, 3, 3a, or 4 you can install the beta today (at your own risk).

Creator Updates

• This week I joined Michael Daniels and Heather Kraafter on Tinkering with Tech to talk about the new Blogger. Check it out if you are new to Blogger or are an old hand still using legacy Blogger. New Blogger will become the default by the end of June, so now is the time to try it.
• YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki posted her mid-year update for creators. It highlights steps YouTube is taking to support the Black community, to connect people to reliable health information about the COVID-19 pandemic, and to help students learn remotely. And it celebrates the recent burst of creativity from home. Interesting numbers:
• YouTube has removed over 200,000 videos for violating the policy prohibiting content with harmful medical misinformation.
• Last quarter YouTube removed over 100,000 videos and 100 million comments for hate and harassment.
• The average daily views of videos with homeschooling in the title have more than tripled in the last three months.
• There has been a 45 percent increase in views of meditation videos. And viewership of “wellness” videos is up.
• At the height of stay-at-home measures, live watchtime on TV screens was up over 250 percent compared the same time period last year.
• The YouTube Giving donate button is now available to more than 40,000 channels. Eligible channels must have at least 100,000 subscribers, and be based in the US, UK or Canada.
• As ad revenue has declined, creators are diversifying their income. The number earning the majority of their YouTube revenue from memberships and paid digital goods up 40 percent since January.
• YouTube launched Creator Mix playlists. This is an algorithmically generated playlist of a channel’s content. It’s tailored for the viewer, suggesting videos the viewer has not already watched.
• YouTube Creator Academy has new free Learning Toolkits ”designed to help you optimize your channels and businesses in a changing environment.” Learn the basics for live streaming, monetization and production, engage your community or pivot your content to something new. There are also free perks from Frame.io, Headspace, and Adobe, so check it out.
• If you want to raise money for a cause, be sure you don’t violate policy. Some YouTube Partners have pledged to donate their earnings to Black Lives Matter and other organizations.. Unfortunately a few have suggested people watch their videos over and over, or click the ads, in order to increase the earnings to be donated. The problem is that is invalid activity on the ads, which ultimately is returned to the advertisers. Such videos may be removed, and the associated AdSense account may be disabled. YouTube now has a guide to fundraising that won’t get your channel into trouble. YouTube isn’t heartless though. Beauty vlogger Zoe Amira had raised roughly $42,000 before her video was removed, and YouTube has pledged to donate double that to the charity of her choosing. (But if your channel isn’t as popular, you may not be given that option).
• A number Twitch streamers were hit with multiple music copyright notices this week. Twitch streams are only archived up to 60 days, but highlight clips (VODs) are permanent. VODs recorded between 2017 and 2019 were affected. It isn’t clear what changed, but Twitch’s solution is to improve their copyright detection and video management tools to help users delete clips with copyrighted music. That is without penalty, at least for now. And that’s a bummer for creators who must now delete hundreds of clips from their channels. Twitch does offer an Amazon Music Extension, but it requires both the streamer and the viewers to subscribe to Amazon Prime or Amazon Music Unlimited. The lesson is that you should always only play licensed music, even if it’s just in the background.
• SmugMug and Flickr are providing Pro accounts to “photographers who are creating and documenting recent activity around fighting racial injustice”. They are also creating a SmugMug site for photographers portraying the Black experience in America, with proceeds going to organizations fighting racial injustice. There is an application form if you or anyone you know should be considered.
• The Lightstream live streaming platform now lets you swap their watermark for a Black Lives Matter banner.

Communication Updates

• Google Meet has two significant updates this week. The tiled layout now lets you see other attendees when someone is presenting. And Meet’s cool AI-based noise cancellation is rolling out to G Suite customers.
• Google Duo is rolling out group call invite links. These only work in the mobile app, as group calling is not supported on desktop.
• Microsoft Teams free users can now create video meetings. Previously free users could only join meetings created by a paid account. If you set up a free meeting, it appears that you have access to all of Teams meeting features, except recording.
• Zoom came under fire for shutting down meetings commemorating the Tiananmen Square anniversary at the request of the Chinese government. They also terminated organizer’s accounts, despite the fact that two organizers are based in the US, and the other in Hong Kong. Zoom has reinstated those accounts, and says going forward they will not allow requests from the Chinese government to impact meetings or users outside of mainland China. They are also developing technology to remove meeting participants based on their geographical location, so that Zoom can comply with local law and allow a meeting to continue.

Webmaster and Advertising Updates

• AdSense introduced new global settings tab on the Ads settings page, to help you manage account-wide settings. Currently you can enable (or disable) ad size optimization for mobile ads. The experiments interface has also been updated, making it easier to monitor and manage..
• Google Webmasters released their webspam report for 2019. The numbers are staggering, with Google reporting “more than 25 Billion pages we discover each day are spammy”, with mostly automated detection, along with some human review. They report a significant reduction in link spam and hacked sit spam. There has been an increase in sites with spammy auto-generated and scraped content, sporting fake buttons, malware and loads of ads, but Google has reduced the impact of such sites in the search results by 60%.
• Google Ads is updating its policies around housing, employment, and credit opportunity ads. THis prohibits advertisers from targeting or excluding ads based on gender, age, parental status, marital status, or ZIP Code, in addition to current policies prohibiting targeting based on “sensitive categories like race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, national origin or disability.”

Productivity Updates

• Edit Google Calendar events in Gmail or Google Docs without having to go to Calendar.
• Google Docs, Sheets and Slides has improved the icon and text that show when a document has been saved or is offline.
• There is a new comment interface for Google Docs, Sheets and Slides on mobile devices. It’s got a cleaner to look and is easier to navigate.

Also in tech news

• Amazon has banned the police from using its facial recognition technology for the next year. IBM will no longer offer, develop or research facial recognition technology. And Google apparently decided to not offer a facial recognition API on Google Cloud because of the potential for misuse. Timnit Gebru, a leader of Google’s ethical AI team, told the New York Times why facial recognition is dangerous: in some cases it’s less accurate than humans (one police department reported a 91% false positive rate), but people tend to rely on the incorrect results anyway, And even perfect facial recognition can be misused.

Upcoming

• Today (June 13) YouTube is hosting “Bear Witness, Take Action: A Conversation on Race” to raise money for the Equal Justice Initiative. It will be hosted by Common and KeKe Palmer, featuring collaborators Jouelzy, AmbersCloset and more.The live program begins at 3PM Pacific, 6PM Eastern.
• If your YouTube channel has at least 10,000 subscribers (1000 subscribers for nonprofits), check out the YouTube Space. The virtual workshops and office hours are available in different time zones in English (YouTube Space LA, New York, London, APAC), French (YouTube Space Paris), Japanese (YouTube Space Tokyo), Portuguese (YouTube Space Rio), and German (YouTube Space Berlin).
• The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC20) is June 22-26. It will be, of course, entirely online, starting with the keynote address and engineering sessions on video. There are also all new developer forums and 1-on-1 developer labs by appointment.

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: Cherry season is almost over here in California, which means the start of summer is around the corner. Pile of cherry fruit by Clem Onojeghuo on Pexels.