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Weekly Update - January 23, 2021: US Inauguration, Google Meet Troubleshooting, YouTube Hashtags

 
January is usually a quiet month, with stay-inside weather and few updates. It’s a great time to slowly get back into the swing of things after the holidays. Only the past few weeks turned out to be more news-filled than anticipated. 

The attack of the violent mob on the US Capitol on January 6th, was a hell of a way to start of the year. On the tech side of things, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch and other social media platforms struggled to deal with content denying US election results and promoting violence. The result was platforms updating their policies on the fly, and the termination or suspension of President Trump’s personal social media accounts and removal of misleading content. For example, YouTube removed “thousands of videos” spreading election misinformation.

It was also interesting to watch as Twitter transferred the @POTUS, @VP, and other official US government accounts to the new administration. That happened across social media, with YouTube transferring www.youtube.com/whitehouse, Facebook transferring the official White House and POTUS Pages, and Instagram transferring @POTUS and @Whitehouse handles.

It feels like things are back to “normal” now, at least for the 2020 level of normal. Fingers crossed the times don't get any more interesting.

This is my first weekly update for 2021, so it’s closer to a “monthly” update. Product updates are just starting to roll out, so it’s not too much to cover.

Take look back at 2020:
YouTube and Video Creators

Bloggers and Webmasters

Creator Tools

  • Google has a new streamlined interface for submitting legal requests to remove content from Google (like copyright takedown notices), including Google Images, Blogger, Google Photos, Google Drive, Google Ads, Search and Google Play. Just go to http://g.co/legal to start the process. Watch this video from Google Search Central for tips on filling out takedown requests.
  • Patreon angered many of its users when their “look forward to 2021” post mentioned they would be changing the way the billing cycle worked. This change - which took people by surprise - could negatively impact the way creators offer their patrons rewards. Patreon posted an apology today, acknowledging the poor communication and asking creators for input.

Social Media

Communications

  • Google Meet has new in-meeting connection troubleshooting tools, including real-time graphs showing CPU load and network stability. If you are having system performance issues in your next meeting, use these to troubleshoot.
  • Meet has also updated the landing page (meet.google.com) for Google Workspace users. It now is similar to what consumer users see, with three options for a new meeting: create a meeting for later, start an instant meeting, or schedule in Google Calendar. Creating an instant meeting now opens the meeting immediately, rather than opening the “green room” join page.
  • Gmail is the new central hub for work, with your chat, video calls, and more. To that end they are making improvements to the layout of integrated products. This week’s updates lets you resize the “Chat” and “Rooms” sections on the left menu on the web. (Chat and Rooms are currently only available to Google Workspace users.)

Productivity

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: Snow covered ground; Photo by Pixabay from Pexels (Free to use, CC0)

Comments

  1. In some cases I put a YouTube hashtag on the title itself. I figure it might eventually lead to more views. Like I have a #PeggyLee video. Her name is already in the title so I just added a hashtag to her name.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So far I haven't noticed much difference in views yet.

      Delete
    2. It probably depends on how many people are looking for that hashtag, and how many others use the same hashtag. I'm still not sure how best to pick hashtags.

      Delete

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