YouTube and Video
YouTube is introducing a new comments panel on desktop. You will see a teaser comment below the video, then the comments to the right of the video, allowing you to watch while viewing comments. You will also be able to view the comments below the video. More
information from Creator Insider.
TikTok announced Live Subscriptions, a way for creators to “generate predictable monthly income”. According to TubeFilter, this will function similarly to Subscriptions on Twitch and YouTube Gaming Memberships, with a focus on live streaming. Subscribers gain access to special content, emotes and subscriber-only comments. Eventually all creators with at least 1000 followers will be able to offer subscriptions.
Web Publishing
WordPress.com has a new “Starter” subscription. Last month
WordPress announced they were changing their paid plans to only offer a very basic free plan and a feature-rich Pro plan. That left many WordPress.com users out in the cold, with the features they use missing from the free tier, and the Pro plan outside their budget.
WordPress Starter is $5 per month, and includes the ability to add a custom domain, accept payments (for subscriptions or donations), unlimited traffic and extra storage for images. It does not include plugins, video uploads or the ability to remove WordPress’s ads or add your own ads, but those may be addable a la carte in the future.
I use Blogger, at least in part, because all those things are free: adding a custom domain, no-ads other than the ones I’ve added myself, unlimited photo and video uploads (with resizing), unlimited traffic, customizable layouts and so forth. The main advantage of the WordPress.com Starter subscription seems to be that it’s easy to upgrade to the full-featured Pro plan.
Ads and Advertising
If you want to know the latest about Google advertising, check out this
overview from Google Marketing Live. There is interesting information, even if you are a publisher or YouTube Partner (or web surfer), rather than an advertiser. There will be AR shopping ads in Search and (coming later this year) shopping ads in YouTube Shorts.
Social Media
Twitter launched Twitter Create, a hub to help professional content creators to “get the most out of Twitter”. It has how-to guides, interviews and tips for all kinds of creators: film & tv, gaming, music, news, sports, nonprofits, writers and podcasters.
Snap introduced “Shared Stories” that lets groups of Snapchatters view and contribute to a Story. Anyone added to the Shared Story can invite their friends to join as well.
Meta’s new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, including
Facebook,
Instagram and
Messenger,
will go into effect on July 26. The policies and terms have been rewritten to make them easier to understand. Also, you can now
set a default audience for your posts on Facebook, so if you want the default to be private posts, you don’t have to reset it.
The world
Google Maps is celebrating 15 years of
Street View with
highlights from around the world from ancient pyramids in Sudan, to the Duomo in Milan, and the world’s tallest building in Dubai. The street view man has balloons and a party hat and you can change to a Street View car when you are navigating. Coolest new feature: being able to
view older images to see how a location has changed (still rolling out, mobile only).
Google
is helping Ukrainian teachers and students with remote learning by donating Chromebooks, training teachers for remote learning, offering premium Google Workspace for Education Meet features free to Ukrainian universities until the end of the year, and expanding
youtube.com/learning to include Ukrainian-language content.
Productivity
In
Google Chat you can now
create personal Tasks from 1:1 or group messages. You can
find your Tasks on the right sidebar in Gmail, Calendar and other Google Workspace sites or in the mobile Tasks app.
Google Docs will now let you
make multiple text selections at once, and add formatting or delete, copy or paste. For example, you could select all the section headings in your document and make them all bold.
id you know you can use the
Gmail “Templates” feature to create canned responses? Gmail Product Expert Somnath
explains how to set that up.
What I’ve Been Reading
Cory Doctorow explains how “
Your mom is a tech ninja” and why you should design products and tools to be “so easy your
boss can use them”. “Bosses have the social clout to force the universe to rearrange itself to your comfort. Moms, not so much.”
That’s all the updates for this week.