Weekly Update - February 27, 2021: YouTube, Podcasts, Twitter

This week there were several big announcements of features that won’t be available for at least a few months (if not longer). There will be new options for parents to manage their young teens’ experience on YouTube, Twitter is working on Patreon-like “Super Follows” and Communities, and Zoom will be enabling live captioning for free accounts.

But it’s not all forward looking. There are new features and updates for bloggers, AdSense publishers, YouTube Partners, and more. Read on for details.

Upcoming in March

• Apply now for the Women of Publishing Leadership Series on March 16 and 17. The application deadline is March 7.
• AdSense will be retiring Link Ad Units on March 10. Check the ads on your website or blog to see if they need updating.
• Google Chat will be retiring the electron-based stand-alone desktop app in March. They suggest using the Progressive Web App instead.
• Hangouts will soon stop working for Google Fi and Google Voice SMS messaging. If you are a Google Fi user with an Android phone, you can transfer your messages to Messages by Google.

AdSense

• If you are an AdSense Publisher or YouTube Partner, be sure to check out your personalized AdSense support page in the AdSense Help Center.
• AdSense (and AdMob and Ad Manager) have a new feature to help with GDPR compliance. You can opt in to allow Google to check real-time bidding creatives for user consent. This option is available on your AdSense account’s EU user consent page if you have personalized ads enabled.

YouTube

• YouTube is providing more options to families with tweens and young teens who have outgrown YouTube Kids, but not old enough to use YouTube unsupervised. The new supervised experience on YouTube will let parents control the kind of content their kids 9 and older can watch. This will be managed through Google’s Family Link. This will be launched in beta “in the coming months”. Learn more.
• For younger kids, YouTube Kids is still the best option. And YouTube is offering a slew of new original shows aimed at kids and families.
• Now all YouTube Partners can access chat support in YouTube Studio.
• Google and YouTube are working to fight child sexual abuse online. That’s important and not something Google can do alone, so they are working with a number of organizations around the world.

Webmasters & Bloggers

• Google has new guidelines for publishers, manufacturers and retailers for identifying products for sale. For example, if you are reviewing a product, use exact product names, add structured data and include an accurate GTIN (Global Trade Item Number).
• WordPress.com has partnered with Spotify’s Anchor to transform your blog posts into a podcast. It can either use automated text-to-speech or you can read your blog post yourself. I’m not sure this would make a good podcast - many articles are not written the same way they would be spoken - but it would offer your blog followers a “hands free” option.

Video calls & Messaging

• Google Meet now lets teachers end a video call for everyone at once. While this is currently only rolling out to Google Workspace for Education accounts, it will be available to other Workspace editions “in the coming months”.
• Zoom is going to enable automatic closed captioning (“Live Transcription”) for free accounts this fall. If you need it sooner than that, Zoom is offering it now to meeting hosts upon request by filling out this form.
• Google Messenger - Google’s SMS and RCS app - is rolling out scheduled text messages. Write it now, send it later!

Social Media

• Twitter announced that they are creating a new feature called “Super Follows”, where a paying follower can have access to private Tweets, newsletters, special badges, or community access. Will people pay? That remains to be seen. Casey Newton has an interesting analysis on how this might affect journalists and newsrooms.
• Twitter is also working on a new “Communities” feature, where people can join groups around a particular topic. It’s been suggested this is like Facebook, or even Google+, but I’m having trouble envisioning that, since Twitter doesn’t really lend itself to posts with comments. Instead it’s more of a free-for-all, with discussions happening in multiple places. There’s no indication of when this might be available, so it could change significantly from the current description.
• Twitter released stickers and “Tweemojis” for Fleets - but only for iOS users in Japan.
• Timed for National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, Instagram is providing information and resources to users who might have an eating disorder and Pinterest is partnering with the National Eating Disorders Association to promote body positivity.
• Flickr now offers a mobile widget for iOS and Android that shows photos from Explore.

More

• If you embed audio or video files stored in Google Drive in a Google Slides presentation, it is now easier to find those original files.
• Google Maps finally has a dark theme.
• You can now embed Pinterest Pins in Microsoft Word documents and OneNote notes.
• The latest version of Firefox has “Total Cookie Protection” to prevent cookies from tracking you around the web. While it does make an exception for some cross-site cookies “such as those used by popular third-party login providers”, it still has the potential to break features that rely on cookies
• Wired takes a look at “how Google’s grand plan to make its own games fell apart”. The biggest problem: “Google is a tech company, not a content company.” Game creation is expensive, messy and doesn’t fit into Google’s work practices for software development.

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.

Photo by Hilary Halliwell from Pexels (Free to use)