YouTube and Video
TikTok’s Effect House platform is
now open to all creators. The platform lets creators create AR effects to share with everyone on the platform.
Web Publishers
Last week
WordPress.com quietly announced changes to their plans and pricing that
caused some outcry. Instead of multiple different types of plans, there are now only two: Free and Pro. The Pro plan is $15 per month, billed yearly. In response to feedback,
some of the changes have been modified. Originally free plans had a cap on views and only 500mb of storage. Now the free plan has no cap on views and 1GB of storage (which is still a significant cut from the original 3GB).
WordPress has also acknowledged that $15 per month is a huge price jump for hobby bloggers who previously paid $4 per month for additional features on the personal plan. I’ll note that this change looks pretty sweet for business users, who previously were paying $25 per month or more. And legacy users can keep their old plans for the time being. (hat tip to Thiago Santos de Moraes for pointing me to this story)
I’ll note that Blogger is free to use, no ads (other than the ones you place yourself), and does not charge to add a custom domain.
Social Media
Meta (previously Facebook) is ready to monetize their metaverse-like platform
Horizon Worlds, and it’s
not a great deal for creators. For items sold inside Horizon Worlds, the Oculus Store (for Meta’s VR hardware) takes a 30% cut and Meta takes another 25% cut. That means sellers will take home less than half the sale price. That doesn’t seem to be much of an incentive to participate on the platform.
Snapchat launched Dynamic Stories. This allows news organizations to automatically create Stories from content the publisher is already posting on the web. The Stories update in real time, which is useful for breaking news.
Productivity
Smart Reply is now available in
Google Slides to save time when you respond to comments.
Google Sheets now
offers suggestions to fix formulas. If Sheets thinks your formula might be missing cells in a range input or otherwise might be making a mistake, you will see a suggested correction that you can accept or reject.
More
Ukrainian officials claim they are using
Clearview AI facial recognition software to identify dead Russian soldiers, find their social media accounts, then contact their families. I’m both fascinated and horrified.
Story in the Washington Post.
Image: Easter Eggs by Goku4501 on Canva. Free to use commercially.