This week YouTube Shorts are coming to America, live captions (in English) are available for any audio in Chrome, and new web communications tool Threadit lets you easily send short video updates and screencasts to your teammates.
Plus there are updates for writers, video creators, Meet, Chat and more.
New tutorial
New tutorial
If you are using YouTube Stories, there are
two ways to save your Story videos: save shorting after recording, or download the video with stickers and text
from YouTube Studio.
Watch the video.
Note that YouTube Stories are still in beta, and are generally only available
to channels with at least 10,000 subscribers.
Upcoming
- This Sunday, March 21, I’ll be hosting a Twitter Chat at noon Pacific time. Join me to discuss when and if it’s better to use audio, video or text. Or just follow the latest #OnEBoardChat.
- March 21 is the deadline to apply for Google’s “Women of AdSense” summit, which is “aimed at empowering Women of AdSense across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.”
- On March 24 is TikTok’s “Ready, Set, Grow” summit for small and medium businesses.
YouTube
- YouTube is adding a “Checks” step to the upload process. This will screen your video for possible copyright claims. And if your channel is in the YouTube Partner Program it will also screen for ad suitability. This means you no longer have to upload the video as unlisted or private while those checks are run.
- The YouTube Shorts camera is coming to the U.S. The camera lets you create Shorts in the YouTube mobile app, but even without it you can participate by uploading a short (60 seconds or less) vertical video with the hashtag #Shorts .
- There are also new features to make Shorts videos more visible. If you have any vertical videos under 60 seconds they will be automatically added to a “Shorts” section on your channel (which you can remove). You can watch Shorts more easily in your mobile subscription feed. And YouTube is experimenting with a “Shorts” button on the mobile app.
- Subscribers to your YouTube channel may get fewer notifications when you upload Shorts. YouTube says “viewers will only receive personalized Shorts recommendations across all channels they’re subscribed to, and not for every Short that you upload.”
- There’s a new experiment that lets you watch YouTube videos in your Twitter feed. This will be available to a small group in the United States, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Japan using the iOS Twitter app.
- YouTube is taking a number of steps to support COVID-19 vaccine education, including teaming up influential creators with scientists and health experts. They have also removed more than 850 thousand videos for violating the COVID-19 medical misinformation policy.
Bloggers, Publishers and Webmasters
- If you publish your own videos, Google Webmasters has new tips and resources for video SEO.
- Google released their annual Ads Safety Report for 2020, which explains how they deal with policy violations by advertisers and publishers. Among other changes, they introduced an advertiser identity verification program, and now share the advertiser’s name and location in the “about this ad” information. Google also invested in automated technology that scans the web for publisher violations, which “vastly increased” their enforcement. They removed ads from 1.3 billion publisher pages and stopped ads from serving on over 1.6 million publisher sites.
- Annalee Newitz writes about the Substack “scam”. Substack is a newsletter platform that allows writers to monetize with subscriptions. But, it turns out, Substack is paying a group of “Pro” writers a substantial amount of money. That isn’t the problem. The issue is that Substack isn’t identifying who the subsidized writers are (although some have identified themselves). That’s problematic because it makes newsletter writing appear to be more lucrative than it is. And by selecting specific writers to fund, Substack is making editorial decisions which ideally should be transparent.
Communications
- Google Meet has shared more information about tiled view on mobile devices: see up to 8 video feeds on phones and up to 48 video feeds on some iPads. While it’s rolling out to iPhones now, it will also be available on Android devices “in the coming weeks”.
- Meet has live captions in English, German, French, Portuguese and Spanish, but that may not help if you don’t understand the language the speaker is speaking. But if you use the Chrome browser, its built-in translation tool can translate the live captions into many languages. OnEBoard’s Nina Trankova, Monika Schmidt, and Brigitte Uras demonstrate how automatic translation in Meet works.
- Threadit is a new tool from Google’s Area 120 for asynchronous video communication. It lets you create short video clips from your camera or with screen-sharing, then automatically stitches them together into a cohesive video. Your team can then view the video at a good time for them. It’s browser based, so all you need to do is visit threadit.area120.com on the web, or use the Chrome extension to record, then share the link. While many Area 120 projects are generally short-lived, Chrome Unboxed points out that features are often incorporated into other Google products. They suggest it could be added to Meet, but I’m thinking it would have a more logical place as an add-on to Chat or Gmail.
- Google Chat will now automatically suggest 1:1 conversations based on your meetings in Google Calendar. The suggestions are visible 10 minutes before the meeting begins, and until 10 minutes after the meeting ends. Note that this is only available to Google Workspace users.
Social Media
- Facebook announced they will be introducing a new platform to “empower independent writers.” It will include an email newsletter tool, integration with Pages, and monetization through subscriptions.
- Facebook is working to improve Group recommendations, with Groups that violate the rules appearing lower in the recommendations, and not recommending political Groups.
- Shaan Puri, former CEO of Blab and bebo, and current Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming & Emerging Markets at Twitch explains why he thinks Clubhouse is going to fail. Why? The “Interesting-ness Problem”: when users visit Clubhouse they need to be able to quickly find something interesting, but as it’s all live, the interesting thing has to be happening right at the moment the user is looking for something to listen to. And he explains why this isn’t so much of an issue for Twitch. It will be interesting to see what happens. Will there ever be a Clubhouse Android app?
Productivity
- Android’s Live Captions comes to Chrome on desktop. Now you can get captions in English for any audio playing in your browser, including podcasts, videos in Google Photos, audio chat and more. Enable this in your Chrome Settings > Advanced > Accessibility. Note that this is currently available for Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linx, and will be coming to ChromeOS “soon”.
- Google Slides has a new minimal presenter toolbar. It now takes less space, with easy navigation to the next or last slide. Advanced presenter tools are available via the overview menu.
- The Google Drive Android app is getting a notifications center, so you no longer have to set up special Gmail filters or search your email for notifications. You can see the notifications in the Drive app, control which notifications you see, take actions and more.
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