Creator Weekly: Google Vids, YouTube Shorts text-to-speech, goo.gl Short Link shutdown

Another weekend has rolled around, and it’s time for another update. I hope you aren’t being haunted by the Windows blue screen of death.

This week the top stories are the launch of Google Vids, Google shutting down their goo.gl short links, new YouTube Shorts features, and more.

Creator Weekly Live 🔴

Come chat about this week’s updates and tips.
Join Creator Weekly Live on Sunday, 10:30AM Pacific time (5:30PM UTC). Join me live or watch the recording.

#OnEBoardChat 💬

This week’s #OnEBoard chat will be about using Google’s Gemini, particularly for writing video descriptions. In addition to the usual poll, there will be a short live stream “how to” on Sunday at 11AM Pacific time. Set a reminder here.
The poll will be on X, YouTube and LinkedIn. Everyone is welcome to join the discussion!

Take this week’s quiz ✅

What do you know about transferring your Google Photos library to another platform? Take this week’s quiz.

To Do & Try

If you are signed up for Google Workspace Labs, you can now try the new Google Vids at vids.google.com. This starts with the presentation options in Google Slides and adds tools to insert video clips, record yourself, add animations and use generative AI features (of course), and then export the presentation as a video. Learn how to get started here. If you want to use the included stock images and video, be sure to read the licensing terms here.

Watch the Tomorrowland electronic music festival live on YouTube this weekend and next weekend. Watch here. Get more information about the artists and event.

Google is Shutting off its goo.gl URL Shortener

Google announced that its goo.gl short links will stop working August 25, 2025.

Goo.gl short links were developed as an internal Google tool, but launched to the public in 2010. It was less spammy than other similar services, and even offered real-time analytics. But starting in 2018, it was no longer possible to create new goo.gl short links. Developers were told to migrate to Firebase Dynamic Links (which is also shutting down August 25, 2025).

At the time Google stated “ While most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.”

That meant that anyone using the short links didn’t have to update them at the time.

And Google continued to use new goo.gl short links in its communications.

But now, any goo.gl short links on your blog, website, social media, or apps will have to be updated before the 2025 deadline.

Starting August 23, 2024 Google will start showing an interstitial page notifying users that “the link will no longer work in the near future.”

For a blog or site you manage, you should be able to search for “goo.gl” to find posts and pages that need to be updated. That definitely works for Blogger blogs (I have some cleanup to do).

This unfortunately breaks the web. Older sites that aren’t being actively updated will end up with broken links. That’s better than some URL shorteners that recycle links, but not by much.

There are alternatives, like Bitly, TinyURL or short.io, but most aren’t free (or have very limited free plans).

And what I am taking away from all this is that it’s bad to use link shorteners for anything other than short-term projects. There’s no guarantee a short link will continue to work properly a year or 10 years in the future.

Note: Google is directing questions about this change to Firebase Support.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

Unlike long-form videos, YouTube Shorts don’t let you set a thumbnail (other than selecting your preferred video frame when uploading through the Shorts editor). This mostly doesn’t matter because the Shorts feed doesn’t display thumbnails. But in the latest Creator Insider update, they note they are working on a few updates that should be available in the next few months, including selecting the thumbnail frame after you upload, and adding text and effects to the image.

There is a new text-to-speech tool in the YouTube Shorts editor. Add text to your Short, pick a voice, and use the timeline to set the timing to add a voiceover. See how it works. This was one of the new Shorts tools announced last week.

To celebrate World Emoji Day, there’s a new Emoji Kitchen effect in the YouTube Shorts editor. If you want to make an emoji mashup to share, you can do that by Google search for “Emoji Kitchen”, then clicking the “Get Cooking” button.

You probably haven’t heard of EleutherAI, but it’s in the news this week for using YouTube content without consent. The non-profit company created a dataset called The Pile that includes subtitles scraped from thousands of YouTube videos from mostly high-profile creators. Apple, Nvidia, Salesforce and other companies used that dataset to train AI models. This was reported by Proof News and Wired, which provided a handy tool for searching the dataset. Marques Brownlee, who had several videos included in the dataset, notes that Apple can say they aren’t at fault, since they didn’t do the scraping themselves, but this is “going to be an evolving problem for a long time.”

For several days last week, the creator-set business emails disappeared from the YouTube channel “About” details. This appeared to be a bug -- if you tried to view the information while signed out, the message said to sign in, suggesting the removal was not intentional. YouTube indicated they were looking into it, but that didn’t stop people from being upset about the “change” or various creator/social media experts from pontificating about the change. It’s fixed now.

StreamYard is adding three new features: Dark Mode, Reusable Studios and 4k Local Recordings (previously announced, but the linked live stream has more details).

Vimeo has updated their Terms of Service (going into effect on August 15) to require labeling of realistic videos with synthetic content, including AI-generated content. That will add an “Includes AI” label. The terms are similar to YouTube’s AI content labeling requirement. Vimeo will automatically label content created with their generative AI tools, and may manually label content that was not labeled by the uploader.

The Instagram Reel editor now lets you add up to 20 audio tracks. Each track can be aligned with text stickers and video clips. This also creates a unique audio mix that others can save and reuse for their own Reels.

CapCut will start charging for cloud storage starting August 1. Previously they offered up to 1GB of storage free.

Web Publishers and Search

In August the AdSense Program Policies will be updated to replace the “Ads on dynamic content policy” with a new “ads in private communications” policy. The policy is largely the same, with “dynamic content” defined as content like live chats or instant messaging, and the new policy “explaining that ads are prohibited on screens where the primary focus is a private communication ike direct messages, live chats, video-chats, and private chatrooms.” So the emphasis on what is prohibited is on the fact that it’s “private”, rather than “dynamic”. Read the policy.

In November 2023, Google launched an experiment that allowed users to add Notes to websites in the Google Search results. While Google Search Labs indicates the experiment is ending “soon”, 9to5 Google confirmed it will end at the end of July. Notes can be exported in Google Takeout (takeout.google.com). It’s not clear what will happen to Google Profiles (profile.google.com) -- mine has a big promo for trying Notes.

Use Google’s Noto Color Emoji Font to add graphics to your website or app. Download the font or get the embed code here.

The latest edition of Google’s SEO office hours is available. You can get the audio and text here. Or submit your own question.

WordPress version 6.6 is out for both self-hosted sites and WordPress.com, including improvements to the site editor, easy-to-add background images, section-specific styles, Grid support and more.

Marketing consultant Jes Scholz suggests website owners (and “brands”) should start using Bing Webmaster Tools. Why? “Bing's index powers ChatGPT, Apple's Siri, Meta AI, LinkedIn AI and Microsoft Copilot.” If you want your website to appear as a reference when the AI chatbot gives an answer, this may be necessary.

Social Media

Instagram now lets you add a privately shared “Note” to feed posts or Reels. These are only visible to “Close Friends” or “Followers who follow you back”, and expire after 3 days. Creators can only see the note if they are part of the audience for the note. This is part of Instagram’s shift towards private sharing. Learn how to leave a note on a Reel or post. Creators can not allow notes on their content.

The Threads API has new Web Intents options. This lets you add buttons or links to your website that people can use to share the content to Threads or click a link to follow someone.

As the official Republican candidate in the US presidential election, Donald Trump has had his accounts fully reinstated on Twitch, Facebook and Instagram (which lets his team purchase ads there). Twitter (now X) started allowing political ads in 2023, and in recent days the Trump team has paid for custom hashtag emoji icons on X. A tip if you are already tired of the US elections: block widely, block early, block often. You aren’t likely to miss anything important, and it makes sites much more pleasant.

Cara, the anti-AI social site for artists, is suffering growing pains. In addition to expensive hosting bills, and no clear solution to raise the funds (they are still figuring out monetization), site bugs, and porn bots, it’s not clear how long they can continue.

Communication and Collaboration

Google Docs has expanded support for Markdown, including exporting a Doc as Markdown, importing Markdown as a Doc and converting Markdown to Docs content on paste. What is Markdown? It’s using code to format headings italic, bold, strikethrough, and links (so _italic_ would display as italic). Turn this on in Tools > Preferences > Enable Markdown. Learn more.

Microsoft Copilot can now summarize Word documents of up to 80,000 words (about 4 times the previous length that could be summarized).

AI Updates and News

The European Union’s AI Act will go into force on August 1. Google says they are preparing to comply and will support their customers, but no word on availability of AI features for free accounts. Meta will apparently entirely withhold its next multimodal Llama model from EU businesses and users. It’s not clear what other companies will be doing, but odds are good that many generative AI features may not be available to European users.

Brian Merchant @ Blood in the Machine: AI is not "democratizing creativity." It's doing the opposite. He writes: “making art is already a fundamentally democratic process. Anyone can do it! (Hence the pick up a pencil meme.) It just takes time, effort, training, dedication, a development of craft. AI advocates have tried to argue that AI helps disabled people create art—but the already plenty vibrant disabled artist community shut that down extremely quickly. No, it’s making a living practicing art that is the tricky part, the already deeply precarious part—and it’s that part to which the AI companies are taking a battering ram.”

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