Creator Weekly: Create Shorts with AI, Dual Streaming, Switch Private Facebook Groups to Public

Dear readers, I love autumn, with crisp weather and colorful leaves. But I hate the end of Daylight Savings Time. I’m a night owl by nature, and it gets dark so early now, I’m already missing the daylight. If I sound at all cranky it’s probably the lack of sunshine. 

This week there are updates for YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, AdSense, LinkedIn, Mastodon and more.

Top news and updates this week

🗓 Ten Years Ago This Week: Creatives on Twitch

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing highlights from 2015. 

Ten years ago, Twitch started to move beyond live gaming content with a new “Creative” category. A decade later there are more than a dozen non-gaming categories, but while they are popular, Twitch is still primarily a gaming platform. Learn more.

My tip for the week: If you choose you can disable YouTube’s visual and audio enhancements, including the new AI upscaling.

YouTube has launched Edit with AI. This is “a new tool that enables you to turn raw camera roll footage into a compelling first draft of a Short.” It is available via Shorts creation tools in the main YouTube app (iOS, Android) globally and the YouTube Create app on Android (in limited countries). 

YouTube is rolling out Dual Streams, where you can simultaneously live stream in landscape and vertical orientations. 

Why is this useful? Vertical live streams are discoverable in the Shorts feed, potentially bringing you a whole new audience.

Dual Streams can be enabled in YouTube Studio’s live control room. The vertical stream is a center crop of your landscape live stream.

 In the coming months there will be more crop templates and compatibility with 3rd party encoders (that’s when this will be really ready to use). 

Facebook now allows private Groups to be changed to public Groups. 

To protect Group-member privacy, all previous posts, comments and reactions will only be visible to members while it was still private, admins and moderators. The member list is hidden and only visible to admins and mods. New content is visible to everyone. 

Admins can change their mind and make the Group private again. 

Group admins can also enable Anonymous participation.

Why do this? If you have a private group that has gone private, this is a way to build membership and hopefully generate some activity. I suspect that the sudden public nature might put off the original group members though, no matter the privacy measures.

YouTube Help AI Chat is launching to more creators. It will provide information similar to what you find in the help center. Some Creators will also be able to contact a live YouTube support agent for further assistance by typing “speak to an agent” or similar phrase. This is available in English, and is rolling out globally except in the EU, UK and Switzerland. For direct help with your channel you can instead use Ask Studio in YouTube Studio (available in English in the US).

You can now add images to YouTube Quiz Posts in the iOS app. This has been available in the Android YouTube app for some time.

If you pay to promote your videos, you can now filter your view metrics in YouTube Studio Analytics to compare organic versus paid traffic. That gives a better understanding of how your videos are performing, and whether it’s worth paying to promote your videos. Bonus tip: Will paid advertising hurt your channel’s organic performance? No. The algorithm only takes into account the organic traffic. 

The Edits video editing app has added color correction, animations and effects for captions, and new video effects.

AdWeek reports that Instagram is testing skippable ads in Reels. A Meta spokesperson said the company “does not plan to share ad revenue with creators during the test, unlike YouTube’s business.”

If you have a podcast show on Spotify, there is a new Optimization Playbook that Creators can download with tips for your show page, adding video and more.

While Vimeo blocks AI training bots, their video player now has “AI-friendly embed codes” with the video transcript in the HTML. This is available to paid plans, and free users can upload their own transcripts. 

For vertical live streamers on YouTube: Gifts and Jewels are now available in Taiwan. 

The updated version of the free Blackmagic Camera app for iOS and Android now supports live streaming to YouTube, Vimeo and Twitch. All you need is a stream key. Blackmagic Camera has  ”Digital Film” controls for a professional “Hollywood” look. The app supports the modern SRT streaming protocol used by professional broadcasters. 

Twitch has a new Moderation Analytics page. It shows detailed post-stream recaps of mod actions like timeouts and bans, including users banned, moderators who took action and any settings changed. Moderators can review user profiles and report users in bulk who were banned in the stream. This is available on the Creator Dashboard on desktop and mobile. Learn more.

Restream now supports local recordings in Studio (in beta). Every participant records video and audio on their own device, so it’s high quality (up to 4K) even for participants with a poor internet connection. The files upload automatically. After the stream you can get separate tracks for each speaker, plus full project files. This is great for podcasts, interviews, or webinars. 

StreamYard improved their webinar chat with auto-scroll pausing and a new comment tracker.

AdSense, AdMob and Ad Manager help centers are getting a new AI-powered Help Guide for troubleshooting and onboarding assistance.

Ad Manager is also getting: 

Google is simplifying the Search results page by removing features that “aren’t being used very often and aren’t adding significant value to users.” The announcement doesn’t specify which features will be removed, but says to watch the documentation updates page. That says they are phasing out the  “practice problem” and “dataset” structured data types in January 2026. Google  also told SEO Roundtable that they are removing “Today’s Doodle” box, nutrition facts, nearby offers and events, local bikeshare station status and the TV season selector.

Last week Canva made a big splash by making Affinity software free. In four days more than a million users signed up. Aimed at skeptics, they have shared more information about why it’s free: their business model is “make powerful creative tools available for free, and charge only for more advanced features like premium content, collaboration, or AI-powered tools if they are needed.” They also note that user content in Affinity is not used to train or develop AI features. (They also talk about the good they are doing removing barriers to creative tools. Take that with a pinch of salt.)

X appears to be sending more traffic to linked websites, but don’t get excited. The iOS X app now preloads content before users click, and that registers as a (fake) view.

Reuters: Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show (!!!) 

LinkedIn updated their Professional Community Policies to clarify when content that would normally violate policy is educational or newsworthy enough to be shared. “Factors we consider include educational value, relationship to major events of the day, the speaker or content author, and whether it concerns matters of public importance.” Graphic or disturbing has an added warning screen.

Mastodon 4.5 was released with post quoting and automatic checks for missing replies. Authors can disable quoting on all or individual posts, and when quoted can revoke use of their post. The automatic check for missing replies tries to ensure that replies from people on other servers are displayed. And there is a new setting on the web that lets you choose native emoji to display.

Discord added a bunch of improvements, making it easier to create and add your own emoji (no 3rd party apps required), you can add a name and icon to a new Group DM before you add people, Settings are being reorganized, and Discord is integrated in more multiplayer games. Check out the announcement for details.

Australia has a “dynamic” list of online social sites that will be banned for under-16 users starting December 10th. The current list includes Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit and live streaming platform Kick. They are also considering Roblox and Open AI’s Sora app. Twitch and Discord are not on the list for reasons that are not clear. The list could apparently change any time, with the Australian government stating that “the burden goes back onto the platforms themselves” to self-assess if they might be subject to the ban” and “if they start rolling out features that look more like they’re becoming a social media company than an online gaming company, then we will seek to capture them.”  (I’m thinking a lot of platforms will just block Australian under-16s anyway)

If you  use Microsoft Password Manager in Edge you can now save passkeys. This allows them to sync across your Windows desktop devices.

Google wants you to keep your accounts secure: Our latest fraud and scams advisory 

A big update: Google Meet meetings will be able to have Google Chat conversations, instead of the current in-meeting chat.  It’s complicated!

Google Meet is also allowing Business and Enterprise customers to pick any emoji for reactions.

Google Chat is adding inline threading in 1:1 and Group direct messages. 

Gemini Deep Research can now draw context from your Gmail, Drive (including Docs, Slides, Sheets, PDFs) and Google Chat. For Google Workspace users, the organization’s admin can turn this on or off.

Chrome has new AI features, including Gemini chat, which can work across multiple tabs, find pages you already visited, access Calendar, YouTube and Maps in the sidebar, an AI Mode search button, and (soon) agentic browsing. It also has improved Chrome’s scam detection and can detect spammy website notifications.

You can now create quizzes and flashcards in NotebookLM.

Opal, Google’s no-code mini-app builder is now available in more than 160 countries.

PetaPixel: Adobe's Lightroom Updates Are What Good AI Implementation Looks Like 

Too true: When AI features are added (Reel by Mark Edwards)

Damon Beres @ The Atlantic: The Age of Anti-Social Media Is Here 

This is a master class from Kevin Kelly: Everything I Know about Self-Publishing

Lindsey Gamble: China’s New Law Requires Influencers to Have Degrees or Licenses to Post on “Serious” Topics Like Finance, Health, Medicine, and Law

Thanks for reading! 🌼