Peggy's Creator Weekly: Cheers to 2022!

Farewell 2022!

I’m still taking time off with family until next week, but I wanted to say thank you for reading and give a brief end-of-year update.

Read this article on my site.

Newsletter Update

First off, my weekly newsletter has moved to the Beehiiv platform, since Twitter is shutting down Revue on January 18. If you are already a subscriber, you don’t need to do anything. You will continue to receive the weekly newsletter as usual, just from a beehiiv.com email address. (If you are reading this in your email, it worked 😉)

If you haven’t subscribed, you can do so here.

The migration from Revue to Beehiiv was pretty painless. I followed these instructions, and all my existing posts and subscribers were quickly transferred.

Find Me On Mastodon

With all the turmoil over at Twitter, I (like many others) have been giving Mastodon a try. I am enjoying it! The people I follow are posting interesting things, and I am not missing Twitter’s algorithmic feed.

You can find me at mas.to/@peggyktc.

I am still on Twitter (twitter.com/peggyktc), and I don’t plan to leave in the immediate future, but I anticipate being there less as time goes on.

2022 Tutorials and Tips

While I didn’t create as many tutorials and tips as I had planned this year, I’m pleased with what I did publish. I have especially enjoyed making YouTube Shorts, so expect more of those in the new year.

In case you missed them:

Google Workspace Individual has turned into a very worthwhile subscription, adding premium Google Meet, Calendar and Gmail features to my personal Google account. And last month they added 1 TB of storage as a new feature. I gave a rundown of all the Google Workspace Individual features in October. Watch the Short for a quick overview.

In November we finally said goodbye to Hangouts. I took a walk down memory lane, as I’m missing those days when Hangouts was the hot new messaging platform.

Google Chat is the successor to Hangouts, and most (if not all) of your Hangouts conversations should be available in Chat and Spaces. I explained everything you need to know about the migration and how to get help in the new Chat help community (YouTube Short).

Note that Hangouts conversations can only be exported through January 1st, so if you want to make a backup now is the time. Here’s instructions on how to create an archive of your Hangouts data. Note that the archive will only go back to May 2013. You can create an archive of Google Talk/GChat conversations by creating a separate archive of the Gmail “chat” label.

YouTube, of course, had a bajillion updates in 2022. The biggest change was the addition of handles as channel identifiers in November. Of course I’m @peggyktc on YouTube.

I focused most of my tutorials on explaining the updates for creators in the YouTube Partner Program, including:

• The separation of YouTube and other AdSense payments accounts and why you should not panic if your AdSense payments account was canceled

• How to apply for the YouTube Partner Program in the YouTube Studio mobile app. (watch the Short)

• Updates to the YouTube Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines 

• Google’s suspension of ads on YouTube and websites in Russia, beginning in March

• If you have a YouTube channel for your business, starting in July Google Business Groups could no longer own or manage Brand Accounts

For bloggers and writers, it got a bit more complicated for people to follow your content. The new simplified FeedBurner has no Publicize features.

And if you set up a Revue newsletter, you need to export your Revue newsletter data before it shuts down in January.

It might also be wise to back up your Twitter data (watch the Short tutorial).

Meet finally highlights new backgrounds and filters!

Hybrid work is the new normal. If you are using Google Meet, I showed how to set up Google Meet Breakout Rooms before the meeting starts. And highlighted how to add co-hosts to your Meet meeting.

Google is simplifying their video call offerings, with Google Duo merging with Google Meet (but no, it's not really simpler yet).

I’m also a fan of Google Meet’s backgrounds and AR filters. I looked at the colorful Google Meet backgrounds by artist Deborah Lee, including the Lunar New Year Year of the Tiger background and Pride background.

In May I joined the Tinkering with Tech show to talk about how to keep your Google account secure, recoverable and private.

And the last remnants of Google+ will soon be gone, as Google+’s Workspace-only successor Currents will be shut down. I looked at how Currents communities will be moved to Google Chat Spaces in 2023.

New York, New York

Finally, a big highlight for me in 2022 was the Google Product Expert Program summit in New York City. It was my first big event since COVID, and it was excellent. I made a short video of the highlights and joined a live panel with my fellow Product Experts to chat about that (and the program).

And in New York I finally got to meet up with my friend Nina Trankova in person. She is the founder and driving force behind the OnEBoard group which has been meeting virtually almost every week since before the pandemic. For the group I’ve been writing up recaps of our weekly public #OnEBoardChat discussions and created a movie and a couple Shorts (here, here) for the #OnEBoardCreative collaborative project. We have also been going live to talk about new things we learned in tech. Subscribe to our channel to follow the discussions.

It turns out 2022 was a lot!

I hope you all have a fantastic New Year’s and I’ll be back in 2023.

🌼 Peggy K

Header image background: Fireworks by Anna-Louise on Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-fireworks-1387577/ (Free for commercial use)