Category: Google

YouTube has begun sending emails out to content producers on the changes that are coming next month to how they can monetize their channels.  The email lays out the new requirements in order to have access to the ad monetizing tools and that access will end starting February 28, 2018 if you do not meet the requirements.

Those new YouTube requirements are pretty steep.  You have to have 1000 subscribers but the higher hurdle is the requirement for 4000 watch time hours over the previous 12 months.  This last requirement will eliminate many channels from being able to monetize.

As Google continues its relentless growth of its data and cloud services, the company announced today their plans to have three new undersea data cables by the end of 2019.  The cables are fully owned by Google and will provide data infrastructure support to various regions and the company’s Cloud Platform.

The announcement came as part of a larger GCP (Google Cloud Platform) announcement where the company indicated 5 new GCP locations will be coming online in 2018.  These will be Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Montreal, Netherlands, and Finland.  These new POPs will give GCP more localize control and cut down data haul times (measured in milliseconds) to those areas & regions.

For the second time in less than six months, it looks like Google is going to be revamping the online Google Store.  A report from Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources within Google, suggests that the revamp will have Google Assistant front-and-center in the redesign where Google will sell their devices and those of sister Alphabet companies like Nest.

The move is in response to Amazon and their own digital assistant, Amazon Alexa.  Amazon had a two year start on Google when it came to personal AI-driven assistants, with Amazon still holding an estimated 68% market share with their Amazon Echo devices compared to the 25% for Google with Google Home.  The disparity has the Mountain View company worried and they are going all out to meet Amazon head on in the space.

Google is embarking on a new way for AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages, are rendered that preserves the original URL.  This is a big deal as the current way that these optimized mobile pages are shown by URL introduces doubt for readers as to the original source.

First, in case you don’t know what Accelerated Mobile Pages are exactly, it is a caching system that Google uses to speed up the delivery of webpages to your mobile device.  Generally these are generated as google.com/amp/ then the site name or page.  The reason for this is due to privacy concerns of Google caching the originating URL

When we first launched AMP in Google Search we made a big trade-off: to achieve the user experience that users were telling us that they wanted, instant loading, we needed to start loading the page before the user clicked. As we detailed in a deep-dive blog post last year,  privacy reasons make it basically impossible to load the page from the publisher’s server. Publishers shouldn’t know what people are interested in until they actively go to their pages. Instead, AMP pages are loaded from the Google AMP Cache but with that behavior the URLs changed to include the google.com/amp/ URL prefix.

This trade-off has created concerns over the validity of the source information.

Google has released the January 2018 Android Security Update patches for the Google Nexus and Pixel lineup of devices.  Normally the patches are released on the first Monday of the first full week in any given month.  Given that yesterday was New Years Day and a holiday, it was delayed until today.

Like previous Android Security Update patches, there are two that have been released.  The first patch is dated January 1 and primarily focuses on core Android fixes and addressing security vulnerabilities.  In this patch there are a total of 20 fixes included, four of which are considered critical fixes.

Google has begun rolling out an improved look to the overflow menus in the Google app for Android.  The update is a server-side change, meaning that as long as you have the latest version of the app on your phone, it will be pushed down behind the scenes to your phone.

That latest version is 7.13.28.21 for those keeping score at home.

Previously, when you were looking at cards in the Google app or in the Google Pixel or Now Launcher page, you would get a pop-up card on the display when you wanted to dismiss a card.  Now, when you tap the three vertical dots in the right-hand corner of any card, you get a bottom-up card.  It looks much cleaner and refined over the pop-up card.