Weekly Update - August 14, 2021: Meet, YouTube, Teen Safety

It’s back to school time! With the focus on younger users, Google has announced new teen and kid safety features for YouTube and Google Search. Meet is launching a new feature that lets hosts (like teachers) add up to 25 co-hosts. Plus there are new features for creators in AdSense, Search Console, YouTube, and more.

This week’s top updates:

• Google Meet will allow a meeting host to designate up to 25 co-hosts in a meeting. Managing participants and roles is also easier with the new option to search for a meeting participant. The co-hosting feature is limited to host accounts in certain Google Workspace editions.
• Google Meet is also making available new host controls to everyone, including free personal accounts. These include limiting who can share their screen and who can send chat messages, muting everyone with one click, and ending the meeting for everyone. Follow this thread in the Meet Help Community to follow the progress of the roll-out.
• Google is making changes to prevent teens from seeing inappropriate ads, and letting anyone under the age of 18 to request removal of their image from the image search results.
• YouTube announced new protections for kids. For users age 13-17, new video uploads will default to Private. Also, “overly commercial” content will be removed from YouTube Kids.
• Dark mode is here for YouTube Studio on the web. Check it out.

YouTube

• YouTube is launching hashtag autocomplete suggestions, which will suggest popular hashtags during the upload process and in YouTube Studio.
• YouTube can now add automatic video chapters to your video. This is enabled by default for new uploads. If you add manual chapters, those will replace any automatic chapters.
• As of this month, new Brand Accounts can only be used for YouTube, not other Google products or services. They will be designated (limited to YouTube). There is less need to create a YouTube channel on a Brand Account these days, as you can use a different identity for YouTube and your Google account, and you can add channel managers in YouTube Studio.
• YouTube announced the first class in the new Creator Program for Independent Journalists.

Publishers

• AdSense released full-screen inline ads to all publishers. These will appear automatically in appropriate ad placements, including Auto ads and responsive ad units. See the announcement for an example of what they look like.
• If you have ever wondered why data in Google Analytics is different from Search Console Insights, or how “most popular content” is chosen, check out this “behind the scenes” look at Search Console Insights.

Communication

• If for some reason you are still using IE11 as your browser of choice, note that Meet will no longer be supported as of August 17. The fix is to update your browser.
• If you have ever wanted to play with webhooks in Google Chat Room, check out this real-world example from Google Developers. You can even add the “bot” (which posts Google Workspace updates automatically) to your own Chat Rooms if you are a Google Workspace user.
• There’s a new official Zoom Community for product support, tips and networking.
• Facebook Messenger now offers end-to-end encrypted voice and video calls. This is a feature Google Duo video calling has offered since its launch in 2016.

Social Media

• Twitter Spaces has a new raise hand feature to let people get their say without interrupting anyone.
• Twitter also has a new font (“Chirp”) and has made some design tweaks. Many people are saying this makes Twitter harder to read.
• The Verge reports on a study that shows “Twitter’s photo-cropping algorithm prefers young, beautiful, and light-skinned faces.”
• Instagram has implemented new features to prevent abusive DMs. The Limits setting will automatically hide comments and DMs from people who don’t follow you. And the “Hidden Words” option that lets you automatically filter potentially offensive DM requests, is rolling out globally.
• Instagram has a new Audio search option. That lets you see Reels that use a particular audio track.
• The Facebook data transfer tool now lets you export Facebook Events to Google Calendar.

More

• Google Trends is 15 years old. Learn a bit of its history, and use these tips to uncover interesting trends.

That’s all the updates for this week. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your favorite feed reader every week. Miss last week’s update? Get it here.

Image: Today (August 14) is Free Comic Book Day. Head to your local comic book store to get free comics. Speech balloons by Nicole Dralle from Pixabay