Creator Weekly: YouTube Clips, Google Web Core Vitals & Search, BlueSky Moderation

Cheers to all celebrating St. Patrick’s Day this weekend. Wearing of the green will get you into the mood for Spring, which comes around on Tuesday.

This week there are updates to Google Search for web publishers, businesses and visitors; YouTube updates for finding your Clips and watching on TV; updates for Instagram, Pinterest, X, Bluesky and other social media and, of course, AI. And more!

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New Tips and Tutorials

To Do & Try

Didthis is a new app from Mozilla that lets you document your hobby projects, creating a timeline of photos, links and notes. The content is private unless you choose to share a link or share with the new Didthis community. Try it at didthis.app (currently iOS only) or learn more.

Google I/O 24, Google’s annual developer conference, is May 14th. It’s a free virtual event. You can now register to keep track of the topics you are interested in and get a shiny badge. There’s also a puzzle, which shouldn’t be too difficult if you play “pipes” type games.

Update to Google’s Core Web Vitals

Google’s Core Web Vital metrics show how your web pages perform based on real world data. The metrics include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which is the time to render the largest visible content element, Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which is responsiveness to user interactions, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures how the layout shifts as it loads.

Why does it matter? Google explains:

We highly recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and to ensure a great user experience generally. This, along with other page experience aspects, aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward. (emphasis added)

INP is a new metric that replaces First Input Delay (FID), which will be fully deprecated by September 9.

Does your website fail? Don’t feel too bad, Google’s sites also fail. And any sort of advertising

Note that you may see a N/A or “No Data”, rather than stats, if your website doesn’t have enough traffic.

Check any site (not just your own) using PageSpeed Insights
Learn more about the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console.
Give feedback or ask questions in the Web Vitals Feedback Google Group.

Safer Browsing in Chrome

Did you know that the average malicious website only lasts 10 minutes? Now, if you use Chrome on desktop or iOS (or Android soon), it will check sites against Google’s server-side list of known bad sites in real time.

Previously Chrome used a list of bad sites stored on your device that updated every 30 to 60 minutes (did you know Chrome did that? I did not).

Google encrypts the URLs so they do not know what sites you are trying to visit. The system matches hashed URLs against Google’s database and returns results to Chrome using a third party Fastly OHTTP (“Oblivious HTTP”) relay.

Ultimately, Safe Browsing sees the hash prefixes of your URL but not your IP address, and the privacy server sees your IP address but not the hash prefixes. No single party has access to both your identity and the hash prefixes. As such, your browsing activity remains private.

For even safer browsing, there is also an Enhanced Safe Browsing mode that “uses additional information together with advanced machine learning models to protect you from sites that Safe Browsing may not yet have confirmed to be unsafe...”. It also scans extensions and downloads.

What that means for you:

Google should be able to block more potential phishing sites, more quickly, so you may see the red “Dangerous Site” notice more often.
This process “requires some additional horsepower from the browser” so there may be (hopefully minor) slowdowns, especially if you have many tabs open.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

You can find all viewer-created Clips made of your YouTube videos and the clips you made from other’s videos in your Library. To find Clips on desktop, open the left menu and click “Your Clips” under “You”, or bookmark the Clips page. In the YouTube app, tap your channel icon at bottom right to open your Library. More info from Creator Insider.

YouTube is rolling out a new design for TVs that makes it easier to read comments and the video description without disrupting the view of the video. The new design may be used to introduce shopping, viewing sports live scores and other features.

TikTok launched their new Creator Search Insights tool, which shows topics that are frequently searched for on the platform. Results can be filtered by topic or “for you”. TikTok factors “search value” in their updated Creator Rewards Program, which could mean greater rewards for creating content that addresses what people are looking for. The Creator Rewards Program requires videos to be longer than a minute, so this also encourages longer videos.

Vimeo announced Vimeo Central, a central hub for collaborative work on videos, with a video library (integrated with Zoom, Dropbox, Google Drive and other 3rd party sources), AI-powered video editing tools, virtual recording studio with teleprompter, analytics, and the Venues video event platform.

Web Publishers and Search

Last year Google Search added a “Perspectives” filter that pulled in results from Reddit, forums and blogs. They are now changing the tab to “Forums”, and it will only include results from, well, forums. You may still see the “Perspectives” label for a carousel of videos, for example. And blog posts will be in the regular search results. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land has the story.

Social Media

Google Business Profiles, which show brick-and-mortar and service area businesses in Google Maps and Search, can now show a selection of social media posts. There can be one of each of the following social profiles linked to a business profile: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X (Twitter), and YouTube. Note that this option is currently only available in “select regions”. Google may also automatically add social media links, which can either be removed (by contacting support) or replaced with a different link to the same social platform.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri raised eyebrows with a Reel addressing the platform’s monetization options. For “large accounts” with more than 100,000 followers, he emphasized fan funding (paid subscriptions or Reels “gifts”) and brand deals, with payments from Meta (bonuses in Japan, Korea and the US or maybe ad revenue) a distant third. He suggests smaller accounts should focus on growth and that direct payments “will never be available to every creator everywhere” as it’s not “economically sustainable” to pay everyone directly. There’s a lot of unhappiness in the comments.

LinkedIn is enhancing its year-old collaborative articles feature. This starts with AI-generated conversation prompts which are then matched with “relevant member experts” who contribute a response based on their professional expertise. They are trying to boost the quality by generating better prompt questions, letting readers mark contributions as unhelpful, and making it easier for people to find relevant prompts to answer. They are also making it easier to find collaborative articles in search.

Pinterest now lets you filter women’s fashion and wedding-related search with body type ranges, rather than just individual body types. The platform uses AI to identify body types. This is currently available in the US and Canada, and will be made available more widely (and for men’s fashion) later this year.

Bluesky’s collaborative moderation tool, Ozone, is now open-source. That means that in addition to Bluesky’s basic moderation, you will be able to install additional 3rd party moderation filters. Their example is a filter that makes sure you don’t see any spider photos in your feed. But the possibilities seem endless.

X is testing a “Pinned by people you follow” shelf in the For You feed. Social Media Today has more details.

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon had his X video show canceled just hours after he completed his first interview - with X owner Elon Musk, who apparently wasn’t happy about how it went. When the show was announced in January, Lemon called X the “biggest space for free speech in the world.” You can watch the interview on YouTube (where it surprisingly has less than 1000 views at the moment).

Snapchat is testing a new option to set individual conversations to retain indefinitely (so they won’t disappear).

Reddit explained how they are working to keep the platform “safe and welcoming for everyone”, especially highlighting the moderator tools they developed over the past year. This seems likely to be aimed at investors, with the Reddit IPO planned for March 21.

More AI Updates

Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern interviewed OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati about the company’s Sora AI video generation tool. When asked about the data used to train Sora, Murati would only acknowledge they “used publicly available data and licensed data.” She would not confirm if YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or other specific sources were used. Stern also points out the similarity between some generated videos and commercial TV shows and movies. Watch the interview.

Wikimedia CTO Selena Deckelmann explains to MIT Technology Review reporter Rebecca Ackermann: In the age of AI, human contributors still matter

Professor of Entrepreneurship Ethan Mollick wrote about the irreducible weirdness of prompting AIs. (It is very weird)

Microsoft now offers a Copilot Pro subscription for individuals that gives you access to Copilot in the free Microsoft 365 web apps (Word, Outlook, etc). It also includes the option to build your own Copilot GPTs, faster AI image creation in Designer and faster performance of GPT-4 during peak times. That costs $20 per month in the US (similar to Google’s Google One + Gemini subscription).

Communication and Collaboration

Gmail has a new email layout editor that lets you customize templates for professional-looking email messages. Email layouts can be saved in Drive to edit or share, with a standalone editor at docs.google.com/email-layouts/create?title=newDoc . If you use a personal Google Account, this is available with a Google Workspace Individual subscription. It’s also available for Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, and Education Plus. Note this is gradually rolling out over the next few weeks.

Google Meet’s portrait touchup mode (to smooth your face) is now available on the web, in addition to the Meet mobile app. This is available to personal accounts with a Google Workspace Individual subscription, or most Google Workspace business and education editions.

In a small update to Google Docs, Slides and Drawings, you can now input a number when adjusting images, rather than just moving a slider.

Nina Trankova explains how to assign tasks in your group’s Google Chat Space.

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