This was a quiet week in the Googleverse. YouTube rolled out new features for
Premieres, tested Clips, and CEO Susan Wojcicki outlined YouTube’s direction for
the coming year. And in social media news, Twitter Birdhouse is a test of
crowd-sourced identification of misinformation, Instagram has a new professional
dashboard; and Facebook explained how it orders your news feed.
January 28 was Data Privacy Day. This is the perfect time to run a privacy checkup on your Google (and YouTube), Facebook and Twitter accounts, to make sure you aren’t inadvertently sharing or displaying content you would like to keep private. You can also set how much of your data is retained and used by the big tech companies.
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: Raindrops on leaf by Pixabay from Pexels (Free to use (CC0))
January 28 was Data Privacy Day. This is the perfect time to run a privacy checkup on your Google (and YouTube), Facebook and Twitter accounts, to make sure you aren’t inadvertently sharing or displaying content you would like to keep private. You can also set how much of your data is retained and used by the big tech companies.
YouTube and Video
- Google Analytics will stop showing YouTube channel homepage data on February 1. If you have that set up, now is the time to export your data!
-
YouTube CEO
Susan Wojcicki shared her review of 2020 and priorities for 2021. Looking back at the pandemic-affected year: there was a 25% increase in
overall watchtime, livestreams grew 45% in the first half of the year, and
viewers watched 100 billion hours of gaming content.
For the coming year YouTube is focusing on improved policy transparency, additional sources of revenue and gathering data to understand how creators of different gender, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity are differently affected by YouTube’s systems (like recommendations). They will be expanding access to Shorts, integrating shopping, and aim to double the number of users engaging with educational content. - YouTube has launched two new features for Premieres: Live Redirect and Trailers. Live Redirect will automatically redirect your audience from your live stream to your Premiere. A Trailer is a short pre-recorded video that will show on the Premiere watch page to help convince viewers to watch. Both features are currently only available to channels with at least 1000 subscribers.
- YouTube is testing “Clips”, which lets you share specific moments from a live stream or video. It’s only available on a few channels currently, but you can test it on the Creator Insider video about - yes - Clips. Click this link to see the Clip I made from the video. A neat thing is that when shared on Twitter, just the clip plays. On YouTube, you can find all the Clips you made at www.youtube.com/feed/clips, which means this is a useful way to save video highlights for your own future reference.
- Vimeo has a new suite of lead generation tools. Place contact forms in your videos, integrate with platforms like Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Constant Contact; and create "engaging GIFs of your videos" for your follow-up email campaigns. These are available for Business, Premium and Enterprise users.
- Twitch has a new dashboard to make it easier to manage your emotes.
Blogger and Webmasters
- Blogger is encouraging bloggers to follow Google Web Creators for “Blogger news, general blogging tips & inspiration, and product updates from Google”. In addition to the official blog, you can follow them on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. While not all the technical updates and tips they publish are relevant for Blogger bloggers, the creator interviews are interesting. And it’s excellent to see Google focusing on its creator ecosystem.
- Google Web Creators has some tips for Web Story Content. They suggest that a Story should not just be a teaser for your website, but should be able to stand on its own.
Social Media
- Invite-only social audio chat app Clubhouse says they will be “welcoming more voices”. They are going to “begin work on their Android app soon”, which sounds like there won’t be an Android version available anytime soon (but at least they are thinking about it). They also will be testing monetization options like tipping, tickets or subscriptions.
- Facebook explained how their newsfeed predicts what you want to see. And it explains why your feed tends to be more of the same.
- Instagram has a new Professional Dashboard. It lets you track your performance, offers tools for "growing your business", and includes tips and tricks for making the most of Instagram. The Professional Dashboard is available to Creator and Business accounts.
- Twitter acquired newsletter service Revue. This will help writers and publishers connect with their subscribers on Twitter, create "new settings for writers to host conversations with their subscribers" and eventually open up new monetization options. It will be interesting to see if this puts Twitter in competition with the popular newsletter platform Substack.
- Twitter is trying to address the spread of misinformation with a new program called Birdwatch. Participants can add notes to Tweets they believe to be misleading. You can see recent Tweets with Birdwatch notes where it appears almost every post by or about a prominent US politician has a note. It’s hard to imagine how that will be useful if opened up to the community at large.
- Pinterest introduced Story Pins following streams, which puts Stories from the Pinners you follow the top of the screen. This seems pretty much like how other social media platforms display Stories. The difference is that Story Pins don’t disappear after 24 hours, and can be shared and saved.
Communications
- Now when you screen share from Chrome in a meeting, Chrome’s popup notifications will be hidden to protect your privacy.
- Google Workspace administrators can now control whether Google Meet meeting participants can change their background.
More
- Google has open-sourced Tilt Brush, their virtual reality painting application.The product is not being actively developed by Google, so this gives the community the opportunity to update the code and build new versions.
- The latest version of Chrome OS lets you customize the lock screen with a screensaver that displays photos from your Google Photos or from art and nature images. It also displays the time and weather, and what music is playing. Confession: I spent far too much time this week picking the just the right photos. But I love it.
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: Raindrops on leaf by Pixabay from Pexels (Free to use (CC0))
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