Creator Weekly: YouTube Analytics, TinyLetter, Tumblr Posts+, 2023 Roundups

As the year winds down, it’s time to reflect on 2023 and look forward to the coming year. Spotify and YouTube Music have sent out their yearly recap. OnEBoard is having its 2024 Commitment live stream on Sunday (join the live chat!). And updates are winding down, at least a little.

That said, there is news for video creators, newsletter writers and more this week. Read on!

2023 Recaps

YouTube Music’s 2023 Recap for listeners gets personal. You get an “album cover” based on your top track and moods, a new feature that matches your mood to your top songs, and shareable cards with your top songs for each season that you can customize with your own images from Google Photos. The Recap page is available in the YouTube Music or YouTube mobile app.

Spotify’s 2023 Wrapped matches your listening habits to one of 12 characters (Vampire? Collector? Cyclops?), puts you in Sound Town (matches you to a city), and you’ll get your top genres and artists (including a special message from one of your top artists). You can find your Wrapped in the Spotify mobile app or at Spotify.com/Wrapped on the web.

The Spotify 2023 Artist Wrapped lets artists (with at least 3 listeners) and songwriters see highlights with shareable cards. Spotify notes that the deadline has passed for recording a message to your fans, so remember to keep an eye out for an announcement next year so you don’t miss that opportunity.

Spotify also has a guide for podcasters on how to use the highlights in 2023 Wrapped for Podcasters as a “blueprint for growth” and engage with your fans.

MyFlickrYear 2023 will be available in the first week of January to all who posted at least one photo to Flickr in 2023. It will include your most popular photo of the year, and stats on faves, comments and views.

Flickr has also opened their Best Shot 2023 photo contest to entries. The deadline for submission is January 4, 2024.

Non-personalized 2023 roundups

To Play With

Play with Google Art & Culture’s Instrument Playground to create (short) music with instruments from around the world. It uses the Music LM AI tool to create a clip from your selected instrument and mood which you can then use to create your own music and sounds.

There are new fun emoji combinations in Emoji Kitchen, available at emojikitchen.dev or in Google Search by searching for Emoji Kitchen.

Video Creator Updates

Twitch is celebrating December Drops Fest between December 7th and 17th. Get all the details about special game rewards and drops here.

X now lets you embed your X videos on your own website as a stand-alone video, rather than as a post. You can do that by entering the link to the post with the video at https://publish.twitter.com/# and select the “Embedded Video” option. (For some reason that page has Twitter branding still)

YouTube has improved the product drops feature to allow creators to insert products for sale in Live Control Room and insert them “on the fly” without a set date and time. Learn more from Creator Insider.

YouTube has updated the Community Post creation flow in the YouTube mobile app. It’s simplified and lets you easily select images from your device to share. Learn more from Creator Insider.

Finally, YouTube Analytics now has a total Members card (if you have memberships on your channel), and lets you dig down to see the numbers for recurrent memberships, where members joined from and cancellation reasons. Learn more from Creator Insider.

Music and Podcasting

TikTok has launched Artist Accounts for every artist and musician with released music. The account comes with a profile artist tag, highlight new releases, a music tab, pin a preferred post to the top of the discovery page, and a highlighted Behind the Song story.

Web Publishers and Search

Mailchimp is shutting down TinyLetter, its free service for publishing simple email newsletters. You can export your data before February 29, 2024. And you are encouraged to use Mailchimp instead (which you may need to pay for).

Tumblr is shutting down Posts+ in January 2024. Post+ let creators offer a paid subscription to their content. Post+-exclusive posts will be set to private, and creators can choose whether to make the public. Tipping will still be available.

Google now supports profile page and discussion forum structured data for use in Google Search. Profile page markup can let Google Search identify information like the name, social handles, profile photo, follower count and popularity of their content. Forum markup for forum-style sites where “people collectively share first-hand perspectives,” and may allow the content to appear in Search’s Perspectives and “discussions and forums” sections.

Google Search also now supports Organization structured data, including name, address and contact information. You can check your markup using Google’s Rich Results Test.

Social Media

Social Media Today reports that Elon Musk effectively said he doesn’t care what advertisers think (but more crudely) of X, while also saying he feels like he is being “blackmailed” by the advertisers “boycott” of the platform. It doesn’t look to me like a boycott, since the advertisers aren’t protesting or punishing Musk. They are just choosing to leave as a business decision. I can’t find the post now, but someone wrote that big advertisers never had a great return on their ad spending on the old Twitter, but it was considered worthwhile because the ads would be seen by journalists, politicians and celebrities. Now many of those people have left the platform, and so advertising is being reassessed.

Threads has made keyword search available everywhere. They are testing a keyword button (#) in the post composer, but there’s no visible hashtag. It’s meant to be used to tag keywords inline, rather than have a bunch of hashtags appended on to the post. Search will find both tagged and untagged keywords. The results are in algorithmic order, and Instagram and Threads CEO Adam Mosseri says that chronological results would be “a substantial safety loophole.” My thought is that this probably makes the search useless for finding news or timely discussions.

Pinterest is testing a new tool that lets you filter searches for women's fashion and wedding ideas by body types. This technology was announced back in September.

Reddit has updated their brand look with new “bespoke” typefaces and a new 3D form of its mascot Snoo.

More AI Updates

Google Cloud is offering a free course on generative AI for the month of December with hands on training and the opportunity to earn badges.

Pika Labs released Pika 1.0, an “idea to video” platform. You can join the waitlist at pika.art/login

Microsoft Copilot is out of preview and generally available. You can try it at copilot.microsoft.com

Meta launched Audiobox, a tool to convert text to sound, including people speaking (set the sound with a description like “man speaking in a cathedral”) and nature sounds. Plus there are updates for translation and 3D vision.

WordPress updated their free Business Name Generator tool with the “power of AI”.

Amazon announced their chatbot “Q”, which can be tailored to a business’s company data. There are apparently some concerns about security and privacy (although Amazon is downplaying that).

Communication and Collaboration

Evernote is limiting free users to 50 notes and one notebook. If you have more than that, you can export and delete some notes to remain on the free tier or start a paid subscription.

Google Messages has new fun features rolling out to Messages beta, including:

Profiles: edit your Google Profile linked to your phone number. Your profile information will show even if someone doesn’t have your phone number in their contacts.
Photomoji: AI turns an object in one of your photos into an emoji. Your friends in group chats can use them too.
Voice Moods: add background and emoji theme to your voice messages.
Reaction Effects: animated emoji reactions to individual messages
Animated Emoji: Post an emoji and it gets animated.
Screen Effects: more than 15 prompt words (“it’s snowing”, “I love you”) trigger full screen animations. Still no /ponystream :(.
Customize the bubble and background color of a chat.

Google Slides has a new recording feature that lets you record a video of your presentation, optionally showing you speaking.

You can only record in the Chrome browser on desktop. The recording can be viewed in other browsers.
View the recording in Drive (desktop or mobile app) or in Slides (desktop only).
Recordings are stored in Drive in a “Slides recordings” folder
Available to Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Essentials Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus and Education Plus. Not available to personal Google Accounts.

The Google Drive app on Android devices is getting improvements to its built-in document scanner, including automatic capture, scanner button, and option to import from your camera roll. The iOS Drive app is also getting basic scanning and organization features. Document title suggestions are only available in the US. To access the scanner, open the Drive app, then tap the “+” and select Scan or tap the camera icon.

Google Drive for desktop is getting a new design, with a Homepage that shows file and folder suggestions (suggested based on a “variety of signals”) and filter chips to help you quickly narrow down search results by people, type, modified date or location. You can opt out by clicking “Change to My Drive” on the announcement banner inside Drive.

The Google Chat app is getting an update with new navigation (to match the updated desktop navigation). The bottom menu will let you switch between Home, Direct Messages, Spaces and mentions. And the iOS Chat app is finally getting the “bubbles” look that rolled out to desktop and Android a few months ago.

Google Sheets has enhanced smart fill for Workspace accounts with Duet AI where it uses both the content and sentiment to suggest additional data (for example star ratings).

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