Creator Weekly: LinkedIn Video, YouTube on TV, Google Photos AI Watermarks

Author

Peggy K
February 08, 2025

Happy Saturday all!

This week’s creator updates are all about video, with updates on LinkedIn, YouTube on TV, and kick. There’s also events for the Super Bowl, highlighted Black Creators for Black History Month and news for Google Photos, AdSense, Bluesky, X, Threads, and more.

My plans? As Super Bowl Sunday is an unofficial US holiday, I’m going to take the opportunity for afternoon beer and snacks.  

Top news and updates this week

  • Gear up for Super Bowl Sunday.

  • Celebrate Black Creators for Black History Month.

  • Video on LinkedIn is “booming”, with new features for video discovery, viewing and creator following.

  • YouTube makes it easier to watch videos and Shorts and subscribe to channels on TVs. 

  • Repurpose.io lets you post your Instagram Reels and TikToks to YouTube Shorts.

  • YouTube Shopping has a bug where FourthWall products are incorrectly rejected.

  • Kick completely rewrote their Community Guidelines. 

  • StreamElements now supports Kick. 

  • The Google Registry now offers .channel top level domains, aimed at creators and publishers. 

  • AdSense wants you to check your email preferences.

  • WooCommerce has a new logo and branding, and is focusing on integrating more essential tools into the core platform. 

  • Google Photos uses SynthID to digitally watermark images edited using generative AI Reimagine in Magic Editor.

  • There are new apps for your social media feeds: Tapestry (RSS, socials, podcasts), Flashes (photocentric Bluesky), Reddtok (Reddit video).

  • Bluesky launched publicly 1 year ago.

  • Threads now lets you share your custom feeds publicly. 

  • X is opening up Community posts to engagement from non-members.

  • Plus more updates for Reddit, Snapchat and LinkedIn.

  • Apple has a new Invites app for iCloud+ subscribers. And yes you can invite non-Apple users. 

  • There are updates for Google Calendar, Sheets, Meet and Chat.

  • Google Gemini now uses Imagen 3 For image generation, and it’s now powered by Gemini 2.0 Flash. Google also no longer pledges to not use AI for weapons or surveillance.

  • Meta now labels AI-generated ads (if they were created with Meta’s tools).

  • Plus more reading and watching, including free classic movies. 

Ten Years Ago This Week

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

Google Maps is 20 this week, and it will be highlighted during the “Ten Years Ago This Week” segment of Creator Weekly Live on Sunday. Join me!

Creator Weekly Live 🔴
What do you think about this week’s updates? Join the live Creator Weekly on Sunday, 10:30AM Pacific time (6:30PM UTC). 

Take this week’s quiz ✅
What do you know about live streaming the Super Bowl?

New Tips and Tutorials

If your YouTube channel is in the YouTube Partner Program, and you are in the US, you can enable Gifts to earn in vertical live streams. Here’s how you set it up.

To Do & Try

  • To celebrate 25 years of the Sims, there’s a new YouTube Shorts “Sims Party effect. Check it out.

The Big Game 🏈

Tomorrow (February 9) is Super Bowl Sunday. 

Black History Month: Highlighted Creators and Artists

February is Black History month in the US.

It looks like Meta ended Diversity and Inclusion and Strengthening Communities initiatives in 2022, or at least stopped announcing them. 

Google Calendar also no longer includes Black History Month or similar US observances, apparently because timeanddate.com removed items that are not public holidays or national observances.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

LinkedIn announced “video on LinkedIn is booming -- the time to create is now”. 

  • New full screen experience for vertical video on mobile (launched last summer) to watch “professional content”. 

  • They are experimenting with a mobile video tab and a “Videos for You” module in the feed for video discovery.

  • “Videos for you” and full-screen video is also coming to desktop. 

  • Search results may also include a carousel of related videos.

  • There is a profile preview within the full screen video player on mobile. 

  • There is also a more prominent follow button within the full-screen video player on mobile. 

  • Video performance stats in Post Analytics now include video average watch time.  

Over the past few months YouTube launched multiple improvements for viewers (and creators) on TVs. 

  • Immersive channel previews with fullscreen background previews that start playing video.

  • New subscribe buttons on longform videos and Shorts.

  • Modernized Shorts player with standardized buttons.

  • Cast to your TV while watching a Short on your phone, without affecting playback on the TV.

  • When you connect your phone to your TV, it switches the TV to the same YouTube account you are using in the phone YouTube app. 

  • Easier sign-in if you use Android TV and your phone is on the same wifi network.

If you are interested in the YouTube Partner Program, there’s a new Creator Insider video with an interview with Thomas Kim, Director of Creator Monetization. It covers the basics, and notes that YouTube’s view of the program is “we succeed when you succeed” and that “it’s this mutual contractual commitment we have to each other.” They want to be “the most rewarding place for creators to create and that’s the mission of the YouTube Partner Program.” Also, if you can build an audience who watches on TV, it sounds like the ad revenue is good.

The official YouTube Creators social accounts are promoting a special deal from Repurpose.io. That gives you a 3 month free trial of their tool to automatically post your entire Instagram Reels and TikTok video catalogs as YouTube Shorts. Sign up at repurpose.io/welcome-creator/ 

If you have YouTube Shopping enabled, and you are getting your products at FourthWall rejected by YouTube, this may be due to a bug. The CEO of FourthWall stated “This is due to a bug on Google's side that impacts YouTube shops, where they occasionally flag you for "misrepresenting" a public figure (your own YouTube channel in this case, hence the bug).” He posted on Reddit for someone to DM him to help get it fixed, but I don’t think that solution scales.

The Kick live streaming platform completely rewrote their Community Guidelines. It did remove a statement that they “value the importance of constructive dialogue over knee-jerk reactions often associated with 'cancel culture'”, but it’s not clear if this is a change in policy or not. Kick’s announcement is just that it changed.

StreamElements now supports Kick, with custom alerts and labels, activity feed, multi-chat view, tipping and more. 

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy says that other platforms just copied them. “YouTube just made Twitch on YouTube. Facebook just made Twitch on Facebook. Kick downright copied the site.”

TikTok published an explainer of their subsidiary “TikTok U.S. Data Security”, which they set up in 2022. It “controls access to protected U.S. user data, content recommendation, and moderation systems in the secure Oracle Cloud.” I’m not sure what to read into this, other than maybe trying to convince the US government that the US TikTok ban should be repealed.

Podcasting and Audio

If you are a Spotify Creator, learn how to use unique Spotify shareable links to track where your audience is coming from.

The Google Registry now offers .channel top level domains (so you could register something like mybrandname.channel). Google says this is “designed specifically for creators and publishers to build their online storefronts, sell digital and physical products and connect with their audiences”.  There is early access (with an extra fee) until February 11, and then registration is open to everyone. 

If you are an AdSense publisher, check your email preferences. There are currently two email opt-in categories, “customized help and performance suggestions” and “Periodic newsletters with tips and best practices”. These will be merged into one, starting in April. Check your email settings at www.google.com/adsense/new/settings/personal-settings.

Gary Illyes, on the Google Search team, apparently said “Originality is something we’re going to be focusing on this year. That’s going to be important.” 

WooCommerce, the ecommerce tools for WordPress from Automattic,has a new logo and branding. They are also shifting from building a collection of plugins towards a single integrated platform, with more essential tools integrated into the core platform, that is “easier to use out of the box”.

There is apparently ongoing drama between Matt Mullenweg (owner of WordPress.org, WordPress.com, director of the WordPress Foundation etc) and Joost DeValk (founder of the Yoast plugin, recent purchaser of the PostStatus community and critic of WordPress management). This seems stupid to air publicly, especially as the legal troubles Mullenweg has gotten himself into seem to be based on his taking business decisions personally and throwing a fit.

Photos and Images

You can now mirror your photos (flip them horizontally) in the Google Photos Android app.

Google Photos is now using SynthID to add an “imperceptible, digital watermark” to generative AI-edited images, video, audio, or text using Reimagine in Magic Editor. The information is also added to the metadata, which you can see in “About this image”. Google says: “We’ve designed it so it doesn’t compromise image or video quality, and allows the watermark to remain detectable — even after modifications like cropping, adding filters, changing colors, changing frame rates and saving with various lossy compression schemes.”

Flickr shared how to set up your activity feed, which, they emphasize, features “artistry over algorithms”.

Adobe discontinued Creative Cloud Synced files for personal and business accounts. It was originally scheduled to be discontinued for personal accounts in February 2024, but was extended for a year. Copies of files from the local shared  folder were deleted. 

Social Media

If you are using Gravatar as your “link in bio” profile, you can now change the background of your profile photo and add cute stickers.

Tapestry is a new iOS app from Iconfactory that lets you combine multiple feeds (RSS, Bluesky, Mastodon, other social media, podcasts) in a single timeline. It has muffling and muting filters that work across your entire timeline and lets you customize fonts and colors in your feed. Interestingly, its main sponsor is Tumblr.

Public Bluesky is 1 year old. Happy Birthday Bluesky!

Bluesky is adding the option to limit post replies to “followers only”. 

If you get a custom domain through Gravatar (which is free for the first year), you can set it up as your Bluesky handle with just a few clicks. The domain is managed through WordPress.com Domains.

Flashes, another photo-centric Bluesky app, is now in open beta.

Fedica now offers Bluesky analytics and management tools. They are only available with a paid Grow plan. Repost their announcement and follow on Bluesky to possibly win one year of the Grow plan.

On Threads, you can now share your custom feeds. Your feed needs to be public, and then you can share as a link or Instagram DM. Each Feed can include up to 150 profiles, and you can create up to 128 different feeds.

You can also verify your website in your Threads profile by adding a rel=me link on your site or other profile (that supports rel=me links). Learn how to set it up. Learn more.

Social media content management platform Buffer says that after analyzing more than 10 million posts on X and Threads, Threads posts had significantly more engagement. But that engagement isn’t very high -- it’s 6.2% versus 3.6%. I feel like that is maybe the more important take home message?

X is opening up Communities posts to engagement from non-members. Non-members may see Community posts in their feed, and will be able to reply to the posts (replies from Community members “will be prioritized”). You can also pin a Community post to your profile. It’s not clear to me how this works to actually build communities, but it suggests community posts aren’t getting enough engagement to be sustainable.

ReddTok is a TikTok-like feed of videos from Reddit. 

A bunch of porn and NSFW-related subReddits were banned, then restored, apparently because it was a bug.

Snapchat announced several new features. Snapchat+ subscribers can use a new feature called Snap Modes, with the option to send self-destructing Snaps. They also announced AI-generated stickers based on what you type (also Snapchat+ only),  the ability to create a movie poster with yourself (and a friend) using AI, and new Bitmoji looks.

The founders of Snapchat announced the “Department of Angels”, a new organization to support communities affected by the fires in Los Angeles. They are committing $10 million in funding.

Communication and Collaboration

Apple has a new Invites app. It lets iCloud+ subscribers create “beautiful” invitations that are integrated with Maps and Weather. Invitees don’t need an Apple device or iCloud account to RSVP. All participants can add photos and videos to a shared album, and Apple Music subscribers can create a “curated event soundtrack”. The AI (“Apple Intelligence”) angle: Generate images using Image Playground and use Writing Tools to help you compose the invite.

Google Calendar has improved management of shared calendars for users with the ability to make changes to events. Previously changes could be made, but the user couldn’t see who the event was shared with.

Google Calendar has improved syncing with Microsoft Outlook and email notifications for event guests. 

Google Meet has improved screen reader controls for the visually impaired.

Google Chat has improved access to app commands. Currently you can use a slash-command to communicate with an app. Once the new quick commands are implemented by the developer you can access them by clicking the + button next to the Chat compose box.

Google Sheets has gotten a speed boost, with faster pasting of data, faster filtering and faster loading.

Google Workspace customers can now transfer Microsoft OneDrive data to Google Drive, with the option to choose files to migrate by date and exclude select file formats or large files. 

More AI Updates

Google published their 2024 Responsible AI Progress Report. It includes an update on their AI Principles, which are now focused on “Bold innovation”, “Responsible development and deployment”, and “Collaborative Progress, Together.” Notably they have removed their 2018 pledge to not use AI for weapons or surveillance.  The Washington Post has that story.

Google Gemini (gemini.google.com) has two recent updates. It now uses Imagen 3, Google’s latest image generation model. It also is now powered by Gemini 2.0 Flash, and you can try 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, which shows its “thought process”.

Google Workspace has gathered their entire “Behind the Prompt” using-AI-for-work series in one article. They also offer a free Prompting Guide 101 ebook, which you can request here.

Google’s NotebookLM and NotebookLM Plus are now included as core services for Google Workspace business and enterprise customers. Learn more.

From John Nack: A mind-blowing Gemini + Illustrator demo. This uses aistudio.google.com for assistance in real time.

Meta shared their Frontier AI Framework, which describes their Open Source approach and how they are trying to mitigate risk.

Meta has developed a labeling system for AI-generated ads. “When an image or video is created or significantly edited with [Meta’s] generative AI creative features in their advertiser marketing tools, a label will appear in the three-dot menu or next to the “Sponsored” label.”  This conspicuously does not label ads created with other AI tools. And does anyone actually check the 3 dot menu on ads for more details?

More Reading (and watching)

Disappointingly, Google announced they are ending their DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) hiring goals “due to the company’s status as a federal contractor and recent “court decisions and US Executive Orders on this topic.”” It’s not clear what this means in practical terms (if anything). 

Reuters has an article about how cozy games can be good for mental health, and it’s in the form of a cozy game. 

Digital Spaghetti interviewed Eric Striffler who has been creating videos for 20 years, since he was literally just a kid (and before YouTube existed). He’s made many changes over the years, had ups and downs, and is mostly funded through Patreon.

Interview with Professor Timothy Tangherlini Why conspiracies are so popular — and what we can do to stop them 

Richard MacManus: What the Internet Was Like in 2012: Do you remember the rise of the visual web and the creator economy?

Thanks for reading! 🌼