Weekly Update - September 4, 2021: Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn

This is Labor Day weekend in the United States. It isn’t just the (unofficial) end of summer, or a day to shop the sales. It’s a day to recognize the contributions of US workers. Take the day off if you can!

This week Twitter launched Super Follows, LinkedIn is killing stories, YouTube is launching Music Library attributions while removing old video attributions, you can access more of your Google Drive files offline and more.

Upcoming changes

If you created videos in the old YouTube Video Editor that included Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) clips, YouTube automatically added a “view attributions” link to that video description. That is being removed after September. Creators should add the attribution to the video description manually. If you are not sure if that applies to your content, you can submit a form requesting a list of affected videos.

However, what is old is new. YouTube is launching automatic attributions for music used from the YouTube Audio Library in the current YouTube Video Editor.

YouTube

• YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal explaining why content moderation should not be overseen by governments. “Companies should have flexibility to develop responsible practices to handle legal but potentially harmful speech.”
• There are interesting insights from Chris Sacca about Google’s acquisition of YouTube (yes, it’s a Twitter thread).
• Six years after launch, YouTube Music and Premium now have 50 million subscribers. That is comparable to Sirius XM’s Pandora, but far behind Spotify’s 165 million premium subscribers.
• Hate raids are a problem on Twitch. While friendly raids can help a channel’s growth, some creators see their chat flooded with bots posting hateful content. To protest creators and viewers took #ADayOffTwitch. In response, Twitch says they are working on features to combat the problem.

Photos

• Google published a technical article showing a new method of upscaling low resolution photos to high resolution, and it’s “Enhance!” in real life.
• Sandy Writtenhouse at How-To Geek shows several ways to add captions to photos in Google Docs.

Communication

• Google Chat has a new integration with the Tenor GIF database, making it easy to find and share GIFs in Chat.
• Microsoft Teams meetings now offers live captions in 27 languages and a new Presenter Mode layout that shows the speaker and newscaster-style over-the-shoulder presentation.

Web Publishers

• Google Ad Manager has a new series of videos focusing on privacy-related topics for publishers. The first episode looks at third party cookies and the Privacy Sandbox.

Social Media

• Google Chrome is working on a new way to create fancy pull quote cards from websites. If you are using Chrome Beta, you can try it by going to chrome://flags and set webnotes-stylize to “Enabled”.
• Twitter officially launched Super Follows. Twitterers can offer paid subscribers exclusive content and conversations. This is for creators who are at least 18, have 10,000 followers, and have Tweeted at least 25 times in the past 30 days. Currently this is being offered by a small number of creators in the United States and is limited to iOS devices.
• LinkedIn is removing Stories by the end of September. The “fun” “casual” content maybe wasn’t a great match for what professes to be a business networking platform. There will be a new video “experience” eventually, taking into account user’s desire to have non-disappearing content and adding creative tools.
• Facebook Gaming Partners can now play background music while streaming.
• Facebook ran a study that shows people appreciate fewer political posts in their feed. Wired points out that “it marks perhaps the most explicit recognition to date by a major platform that “what people engage with” is not always synonymous with “what people value,”...”
• The Clubhouse audio platform has a new Creator Commons hub, where you can find instructions and tips for hosting - and monetizing - rooms.

Productivity

• Google Calendar is getting Time Insights, so you can see how much time you spend in meetings. This is only available to some Google Workspace customers. See the article for details.
• You can now make non-Google files available offline in Google Docs, including PDFs and Microsoft Office files. This has been available in beta to some Google Workspace users since 2019. And ChromeOS users can now use the Files app on their Chromebook to select Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides files to be available offline.
• If you work with Microsoft Office files in Google Docs, Sheets or Slides, you can now view embedded Microsoft Office files in those documents.

More

• There is new research that shows that people who are hostile and aggressive online are the same way offline. While that isn’t much of a surprise, they also found that non-hostile people are more likely to skip online political discussions. So yes, political discussions online are full of trolls and jerks.
• Google Arts and Culture worked with the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, UK to launch an online digital archive that includes student films and interviews. The NFTS has many successful graduates, including Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit), Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin), David Yates (Fantastic Beasts), Beeban Kidron (Oranges are not the only Fruit), Adrian Rhodes (Tomorrow Never Dies), Anthony Chen (Ilo Ilo), Roger Deakins (Blade Runner) and Clio Barnard (The Selfish Giant).

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: The photo today is hardhats by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay (free for commercial use). I hesitated using it a bit, because physical labor isn’t the only kind of labor. Labor day is for all workers, whether at a desk, in a shop, on a construction site or anywhere else. But I do like the photo, so I used it anyway.