It was a light weekend, but here are a few things that caught my eye over the last few days
Airbnb reporting an increase in domestic bookings
Some interesting data from Airbnb related to COVID-19. The company is reporting an uptick in “local” bookings, which are defined as bookings within a country. Over half of between May 17th and June 3rd were bookings within roughly 320km of the home address of the person booking the stay. The data also suggests longer local trips compared to shorter international ones. Part of this is theorized to be because of expanded work from home programs allowing people to work from different locations.
It will be interesting to see this trend over the short to medium term as the world continues to deal with COVID-19 while still opening up and allowing more travel
Google Duo Now Allows Anyone to Join a Call With a Link
Google’s video calling service, Google Duo, launched in mid 2016 to little fanfare because of it’s very basic and bare bones feature set. While it’s companion chat product, Allo, died a quick death, Duo gained enough popularity to stick around and the company has continued to develop it. With COVID-19, the pace of development has quickened greatly. One thing that was missing compared to competitors like Skype and Zoom was the ability to send a link that anyone can click on to join a call. Google has fixed that, and now the option exists. This makes Duo a more viable option for group video calls, which most of us are doing a lot more of now.
YouTube Posts Documentation on Monetization
One thing that has been frustrating for many YouTube creators are the often opaque rules around monetization of videos. For creators trying to actually make some kind of income from YouTube, these rules and the lack of transparency around them meant that a video the creator believed was safe to monetize would be flagged and had monetization removed by Google, which affects the channel as a whole. Having a video demonetized too often risks Google demonetizing an entire channel, which would be devastating to creators.
Google has finally published guidelines on what videos can and cannot be monetized, as well as examples of where the line is on whether a video can be monetized or not. This doesn’t solve the problem with the algorithm and discoverability on the platform, which is an even bigger issue than the monetization rules, but hopefully this helps creators know where the line is, and make it easier to stay in Google’s good graces when attempting to monetize.
Twitter Labels Tweets Falsely Linking 5G to COVID-19
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic there have been several conspiracy theories stating that the brand new 5G technology for cell phones is the cause for the virus. It even escalated to the point that several cell towers in the United Kingdom were set on fire. This is despite the fact that there currently is no 5G service in the United Kingdom. There is no link between 5G and COVID-19, but those pushing the false claims and conspiracy theories have used social networks to propgate the false stories. Twitter has begun tagging tweets that link 5G to COVID-19 with a fact check, which is a link that directs users to a page that states there is no link between 5G and COVID-19. This is welcome, and took far too long.