Creator Weekly: YouTube Reimagine, Canva Magic Layers, Facebook Creator Fast Track

I'm still not fully back up yet, so no live stream this week again. You should watch this week's OnEBoard Tech Topic, because I'll have a tip!

YouTube launched Reimagine, an AI Shorts Remix tool that lets you generate an 8 second clip from a single Shorts frame. You can use two images from your mobile gallery to insert a person (yourself?) or object. It's powered by the Veo video generation model. Creators can disable all remixing on their Shorts if you don't want people to do this. Yes, I tried it and I find it a bit uncanny.

YouTube is testing “Discover videos with previews”. On your home tab you will see 5-10 previews from recommended videos showing “short engaging moments”. Watch the whole video, or add to your Watch Later playlist. 

When you do a travel or shopping related search YouTube on mobile, you will see a grid of Shorts about related places and products. 

If you upload multiple language audio tracks to your YouTube videos, you can now add language-localized thumbnails. Learn how.

The Edits video editing app has more new features: new cinematic visual and sound effects, sharper camera, masking on the main track and frame-by-frame precision trimming (iOS only). 

What is Substack? It's not really a “newsletter” platform. Substack now has a built-in video recording studio. Features include:

Tumblr announced Reblogs in a chain get their own notes. After 49,000 mostly negative comments they reversed the change.

WordPress launched my.wordpress.net, which runs WordPress in your browser. Sites are private by default, and meant to be a private workspace for drafting and exploration. It lives in your browser (make backups frequently) with about 100 MB storage. If you want to make it public you can move to a hosted WordPress installation.

Canva launched Magic Layers, an AI tool that converts flat images into editable multi-layered designs, including text. It's designed to let you edit AI generated images (including from other platforms), but it's not limited to those. It's currently in public beta in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. 

New features for Google's NotebookLM AI tool.

Facebook has a new invite-only Creator Fast Track program. Will creators stay after the payments stop?

In addition to Facebook's new emphasis on original content, there are new monetization metrics to help creators better understand earnings.

There's now a Meta AI support assistant for Facebook and Instagram, which can help with things like resetting your password or updating your profile. They are also rolling out the support assistant to people who need help logging into their Facebook and Instagram accounts, “starting with select cases” in the US and Canada.

Remember when Facebook decided to go all in on the metaverse, even changing the company name to Meta? That didn't work quite as expected. Meta announced on Tuesday that its Horizon Quest metaverse platform would no longer be available in VR. And a twist, a couple days later, they reversed that decision, maybe because it sounded so bad. But it seems billions were spent on the not very popular platform. (Meta says the metaverse is actually VR and AR and mobile. So everything?)

A small, useful update: Instagram finally lets you pause Reels with a tap. 

Automated accounts on Bluesky can now voluntarily label themselves as bots. Bluesky says that there may be additional policies for automated accounts in the future. 

X launched Creator Subscriptions 2.0, that let's creators lock any thread in a post for paid subs only. Plus subscriber-only articles will appear in the main profile feed, and onboarding subs is easier. 

If you upload images to X, you can block Grok from editing them. 

X wants users to help improve the Reply algorithm with down votes.

X added AI article summaries for long-form X posts (not linked articles) 

Google Search is testing replacing article headlines in the search results with bland AI generated versions. This is terrible, as a good headline not only tells you what the article is about, but also gives a sense of the framing and tone. It's how I choose which article to click.