Peggy K's Creator Weekly: Duo legacy calls become Meet calls, Google Search core update, Threads Insights

The summer is winding down, kids are going back to school and I’m feeling like the past few months have just flown by. There are updates this week for web publishers, YouTubers and more.

This week Google announced their new phones, with AI everywhere; Google Meet started replacing legacy Duo calling with Meet calls; the Google Search August core update is meant to show less made-for-Search sites; YouTube is testing several new features; Threads launched creator insights and more. 

Top news and updates this week

• Try: Google Drive document scanner

• Google Pixel 9 camera and AI features

• Meet calls are rolling out; Duo legacy calling is going away

• Google Search August 2024 Core Update to highlight “genuinely useful content”

• YouTube Super Chat likes and replies

• The YouTube Membership Join button sparkles when mentioned

• YouTube is testing AI-generated live chat summaries

• YouTube is testing discovery feeds with mixed formats

• Google Search AI Overviews will display relevant links more prominently

• Substack lets users create posts without creating an email publication.

• Creators using Patreon for support will have to either raise their rates for subscriptions from iOS devices or eat the 30% Apple fee.

• Google is deactivating AdSense for YouTube and web publishers based in Russia.

• The White House held a creator economy conference.

• Threads is rolling out Insights, saved drafts and scheduled posts.

• Flipboard now lets you follow anyone in the Fediverse.

• Telegram launches monetization options (paid in cryptocurrency)

• Google Gemini will be adding extensions for Keep, Tasks and Calendar.

Read on for details and additional updates!

To Do & Try

Did you know that you can use the Google Drive app to scan documents and save them as PDF files?  Now, if you are using the Android Drive app, you can also save your document scans as JPG image files.

Made By Google, with AI in Everything

This week was Google’s annual “Made By Google” event, where they announced the new Pixel 9 phones, a new Pixel Watch and Pixel Buds. Not surprisingly, all of those are full of AI features. 

You can read all the announcements here, but I wanted to highlight some of the creative features that will be available.

• Both the Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro cameras have improved camera lenses.

• The Pixel 9 Pro camera has Super Res Zoom video, which combines an upgraded telephoto camera with “advanced machine learning”.

• The Pixel 9 Pro includes Video Boost, using “AI upscaling” to create videos in up to 8K resolution.

• Add Me is a fun feature that lets you take a photo of a group, then have someone else take a second photo with the first photographer in frame. The camera helps make sure that the second image lines up with the first image, making a seamless composite. (John Nack suggests the old David Hasselhof photobombs were more fun).

• New AI editing features: Reimagine (change a photo’s scene with generative AI), Auto Frame (improve a photo’s framing, including filling in blank spots with generative AI), Zoom Enhance (zoom in on your captured photos with enhance “intelligently filling in the gaps between pixels).

• Night Sight in Panorama, with an improved interface for creating a panorama, with night sight for nighttime scenes.

• Pixel Studio is a new app for generating editable images that can be turned into stickers and shared in Messages.

• Live Caption and Live Transcribe are available in more languages, even offline.

• Pixel Screenshots lets you save, organize and easily search your saved screenshots.

Most of these are Pixel 9 exclusives.

Meet Calls Are Coming, Legacy Duo Calls are Going Away

Legacy Duo-style calling is finally going away, to be replaced by Meet calling. There will be new features that will be familiar if you use Meet for meetings, such as live captions, screen sharing, in-call text chat and more. 

Some legacy call features will be going away, like Knock-Knock, family mode, and calling on your Nest device. 

I’ve written up a detailed overview of what changes will be coming to Meet video calling over the next few months. 

Google Search Update Aims to Highlight “Genuinely Useful Content” and (maybe) smaller sites

A frequent complaint from creators, website owners, and regular readers is that Google Search includes too many highly ranked “made for search” results. 

The Google Search August 2024 Core Update, which just started rolling out, aims to fix that. Google says: 

This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.

• Google has taken into account creator and other feedback

• This aims to “better capture improvements that sites may have made”

• Google does want to include relevant “small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content” in the search results, and something they are still working to improve.

This will take about a month to roll out. 

If you see a drop in traffic to your site that you think might be caused by this core update, Google has advice on what steps to take to understand what’s causing the change and how to fix it. Three bits of advice from that page stand out: 

• “In general, most sites don't need to worry about core updates and may not even realize one has happened.”

• “If you're considering deleting entire sections of your site, that's likely a sign those sections were created for search engines first, and not people.”

• “If you've made improvements, it may take time to see an effect in Search results: some changes can take effect in a few days, but it could take several months for our systems to learn and confirm that the site as a whole is now producing helpful, reliable, people-first content in the long term.”

Hopefully these changes will help smaller independent sites rank better in the search results.

Also of note: There is currently an issue with ranking in Google Search that is “affecting a large number of search results”. This issue began August 15, and Google is working on it. There should updated information by August 19 at 9:30 AM PDT.  You can find updates an information about current issues with crawling, indexing and ranking on the Google Search Status Dashboard.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

Now YouTube Super Chat live stream donation comments have likes and replies to make them more engaging.

More sparkles! When someone in a YouTube video says “subscribe” or “like button” the related button under the video player sparkles. And now, if Memberships are available, the “join” button also has a sparkle moment. How does YouTube do that? Transcripts and machine learning. More details.

YouTube has also been making other changes to the video watch page to make it more dynamic, including cycling top comments, a more nicely organized description, text formatting and more to come. Watch the Creator Insider interview for more details.

YouTube is also expanding on their test of AI-generated live chat summaries.

YouTube is testing new discovery options, such as a feed of long-form videos or a mix of video formats, sort of like the Shorts feed, but not only Shorts.

The YouTube Creator Award play button has an updated “lighter sized” design. 

Web Publishers and Search

Google Search AI Overviews now display relevant links on the right on desktop and on mobile it will show site favicons. They are testing displaying links within the overview itself and have found that “showing links to supporting web pages directly within AI Overviews is driving higher traffic to publisher sites” (no surprise there) and these are “higher quality” visitors to sites. Google also wants you to know that the ads adjacent to the overview are totally relevant businesses. If you have opted in the “AI Overviews and more” Search Labs experiment, you can also try saving helpful overviews.

Substack is moving more towards being a social site that happens to let creators email out newsletters, rather than being a newsletter site. Now any Substack user can create posts without creating a publication. Other Substack users can Pledge to the poster that they will support a paid subscription in the future. If nothing else, this makes it more difficult for posters to move to a different platform.

Creator Economy

Patreon is switching their iOS app to Apple’s in-app payment system, under threat of being removed from the App store. Apple will take a 30% cut of any new memberships or Patreon shop purchases made in the iOS app. Creators have the unenviable choice of raising their prices for iOS users or taking a 30% cut in those earnings. It also requires creators to switch from first-of-the-month billing or per-creation billing to subscription billing, because that’s the only type of billing Apple supports.  

Google will be deactivating Russia-based AdSense, AdSense for YouTube, AdMob and Ad Manager accounts due to “ongoing developments in Russia.” This will affect web publishers, YouTube partners and app monetizers. Google and YouTube stopped serving ads in Russia in 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine.

This week was the first ever White House Creator Economy Conference, which brought together creators, entrepreneurs, marketers, and other creator economy experts. It sounds like an interesting event that gave the invitees a chance to network, attend panels, learn about relevant US policies, and share their own experiences. See posts from Lia Haberman (IKYMI), Tubefilter, Lissette Calveiro, and Lindsey Gamble.

Social Media

Threads is rolling out new creator and business-oriented features on desktop, including Insights (stats for views, interactions, demographics), saving draft posts, and scheduling posts.

Threads posts made by the API (such as from 3rd party services like Buffer) will be posted to the Fediverse as well, if the account has Fediverse sharing enabled.  

Bluesky is not the biggest social site, but it has some nifty features like starter packs. Those can include both people and accounts to follow and topic feeds, and are meant to be a starting place for new users or people who want to follow a particular topic. The Bluesky blog features some nice starter packs, including Educators, Chemists and Chemistry, Comics Creators, UK Politics and more.

Flipboard now lets you follow anyone in the Fediverse, including Mastodon and federated Threads accounts.

X Premium subscribers have a few new features: 3rd party posting tools can now post 4000 character posts to X, and a new and improved Audience Insights tab, 

This didn’t go well: Elon Musk’s interview with Donald Trump crashes on X  

Mike Masnick @ Techdirt: Can We Finally Stop Pretending Elon Musk Is A “Free Speech Absolutist”? He’s Not  

Rene Diresta and Josh Goldstein @ Misinformation Review: How spammers and scammers leverage AI-generated images on Facebook for audience growth

Flickr introduced new ways to organize and search for your albums.

Telegram now offers monetization options for all types of profiles, including bots. People can bestow Star Reactions on posts or pay for subscriptions with Stars. Creators can then convert the Stars into Telegram’s Toncoin cryptocurrency, or use the Stars to pay for ads.

Communication and Collaboration

Google Sheets is making it easier to convert data into a table, with “Convert to table” suggestions that let you preview what the table will look like.

Data collected in Google Forms will now be collected in a nicely formatted Google Sheets table, rather than in spreadsheet form. Existing form data in Sheets can be manually converted into a table.

AI Updates and News

Gemini Live lets you have a “free flowing” conversation with Google Gemini on your mobile device. (Requires Gemini Advanced subscription)

You will soon be able to add more extensions to Google Gemini, including Keep, Tasks, Calendar, Utilities and additional YouTube Music features. This is in addition to the current extensions for Google Workspace (including Gmail and Drive), YouTube, Flights, and Hotels. You can find your extensions at gemini.google.com/extensions.

404 Media reports Nvidia Sued for Scraping YouTube After 404 Media Investigation.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Stanford students that successful AI startups can steal intellectual property and then hire lawyers to “clean up the mess”. He went on to say “But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.” This does seem to be the standard playbook. The only surprising thing is that he said that out loud.

Thanks for reading! 🌼