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Weekly Update - July 23, 2022: Meet livestreaming to YouTube, faster Content ID appeals, Shopping for YouTube Creators


This week there are lots of great updates for YouTubers, including live streaming from Meet, resolving your Content ID appeals faster, and Shopping to your channel. There are also updates and tips for using FeedBurner, a new Facebook Feed, updates to the Instagram Reels editor, updated messaging and productivity tools and more.

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Meet live streaming to YouTube

This week’s big announcement was the launch of live streaming from Google Meet to YouTube.

Following up on last week’s announcement that Google One Premium subscribers in certain countries have access to Google Meet recording and longer group calls, this week Google announced that Google One Premium subscribers will also be able to live stream from Meet to YouTube.

This is also available to personal accounts with a Google Workspace Individual subscription.

And it’s available to Google Workspace Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade customers.

There is more information in the Meet Help Center.

If you were a fan of the old Hangouts on Air, this might be what you were looking for. Maybe. Stay tuned!

It will likely take a few weeks for this to roll out to all users, so if your account is eligible keep an eye on available features on the Activities tab for the meetings you host.

Learn how to set up and manage Google Meet breakout rooms

If you host Google Meet meetings with an account that supports breakout rooms, you can make your meetings go more smoothly by setting up the breakout rooms in advance.

I have a new tutorial on how to set up breakout rooms in Google Calendar, and how to manage your breakout rooms once the meeting starts.

Watch the video or read the article.

FeedBurner’s Feed Publicize Features are shutting down

This week I discovered that a widget on one of my sites showing my latest articles no longer worked. That took me down a path of discovery:
  • FeedBurner is shutting down its Publicize features including BuzzBoost and Headline Animator
  • There is a new simplified FeedBurner interface that I occasionally was directed to when visiting feedburner.google.com. This pretty much only lets you manage your feed URL and title.
  • There are a number of other services that let you set up widgets to display your feed. Those are (mostly) not free.

If you have any FeedBurner links, widgets or embeds on your own blog or website, now is the time to remove them.

Get all the details here.

Sell Products from your Shopify Store on YouTube

If you have an eligible YouTube channel and a Shopify store, you can now link them together to promote your own products on your channel.

Current eligibility requirements for "Shopping" include:
  • Your channel has been approved for monetization in the YouTube Partner Program
  • Your channel has at least 1000 subscribers
  • Your channel is not Made for Kids
  • Your channel does not have a significant number of videos violating monetization policies
  • Your channel has not received any Hate Speech Community Guideline strikes
To get started, head over to YouTube Studio, open your Monetization settings, then click the Shopping tab.

There are more details in the YouTube help center.

Watch YouTube’s Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl answer creatorquestions about Shopping on YouTube.

Faster YouTube Content ID Appeals

On YouTube, if your video gets a Content ID claim that you know is incorrect, you can dispute the claim.

If the dispute is unsuccessful, then you can appeal.

YouTube has sped up that process. While the initial dispute can still take 30 days, now if you appeal, the claimant must either release the claim or request your video be taken down within 7 days, rather than an additional 30 days.

Some creators will also be able to skip the dispute step and submit an appeal directly for block claims.

Learn more in the YouTube Help Center.

More of this week’s updates

YouTube and Video

If you have an iOS device, you can convert YouTube Clips of your own content into Shorts. Clip your own content and create a new Short with just a few clicks. Hopefully it’s available for Android soon.

Use bold, italic and strikethrough in your YouTube video descriptions.

YouTube will remove content that provides instructions for unsafe abortion methods or promotes false claims about abortion safety under their medical misinformation policy. They are also adding an info panel linked to health authorities on abortion related content.

The Instagram Reels editor is getting a bunch of new features: new Remix options, including the ability to Remix photos, Remix layouts, and the ability to add your clip after the original Reel. There are also new Reel templates and a new “Dual” option to record with back and front camera at once. And to top it off, now all videos posted to Instagram as Reels. Reels reels reels!

Twitch Charity is a new fundraising stream feature currently in beta. It is handled behind the scenes by PayPal Giving Fund, and Twitch does not take a cut of the donations.

TikTok is becoming a bit more accessible, with auto-generated captions and translations of captions, video captions and descriptions.

Web Publishers

WordPress.com is bringing back their original pricing plans. New simplified plans were rolled out in April, but they apparently didn’t meet users’ needs. After several revisions they are finally went back to the original plans.

Social Media

Facebook is launching a new “Feeds” tab, where you will be able to find the posts you want to see from your friends, favorites, Pages and Groups. The current main tab will be the “Home” tab, with recommended content, Reels and more. Facebook wants you to find content that helps you explore your interests, rather than just reading updates from friends and family.

You can now clip a moment in a Twitter Space, then share the audio clip.

Snapchat for Web lets you message or call friends on desktop. This will initially only be available to Snapchat Plus subscribers.

Tumblr
is making it easier to find new content using the tags you follow.

More Google Meet

Google Meet meeting hosts can now choose to allow anonymous responses to in-meeting polls and anonymous questions. This is available to Google Workspace editions that include polls or Q&A.

Messaging

If you use Messages by Google on your Android device, be sure to check out the new features: reactions from iPhone users are displayed as emojis, Google Photos integration lets you easily send video (and soon photo) links, “gentle nudges” to reply to conversations left hanging, and see birthday reminders for your friends in your Google contacts.

You can now delete named Spaces in Google Chat. When a Space is deleted, it deletes all of the Space’s posts, tasks, and files and attachments not saved elsewhere.

Google Workspace users can now create Google Chat Spaces with up to 8000 members. This is not available to personal Google accounts, where the member limit is still 400.

A nice little update: you can easily access your “Frequently Used” emojis in Google Chat.

Productivity

Share your Google Calendar appointment booking page or embed it on your website. This is available to Google Workspace Individual subscribers and other Google Workspace editions.

Google Calendar now lets you only display event invites on your calendar from people you know. By “know” they mean people in the same Google Workspace domain, people in your Google Contacts, and people you have interacted with before. With this setting turned on, you can still get email invites from unknown people, which will appear on your Calendar if you accept the invite.

In Google Docs you can now enable email notifications of document changes for individual document files. You can choose to be notified of comments, mentions, and/or added and removed content.

Just for fun

Android GBoard lets you combine emoji with Emoji Kitchen. Now you can explore all the combinations at emoji.supply/kitchen



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: Photo by Elias Tigiser on Pexels, free to use commercially, no attribution required.

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