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Automattic, the parent company of Tumblr and WordPress.com will soon be acquiring the popular podcast app- Pocket casts from a collective of public radio groups, including NPR and BBC Studios. According to Tech Crunch co-founders Russell Ivanovic and Philip Simpson will remain in charge of the Pocket Casts team. “As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you with the features needed to enjoy your favourite podcasts (or find something new),” a WordPress.com blog post states.

“We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts,” the statement further read. If you are tech-savvy you must be aware of the advancement in the blogging experience, this move will bring on. As per Tech Crunch, both blogs and podcasts use RSS feeds for distribution, so integrating the two platforms is going to be a good move by the company. However, Automattic didn’t disclose how much it will pay for Pocket Casts. Earlier this year, Spotify-owned Anchor teamed up with WordPress.com to turn written material into podcasts via text-to-speech tech.

American tech giant Google recently launched a new privacy feature for search that lets users instantly delete their last 15 minutes of search history on mobile. According to The Verge, this new option was first revealed alongside several other search and Chrome improvements at I/O 2021 and is now rolling out to everyone. The option to delete the last 15 minutes of search history is currently only available in Google’s iOS app and is headed to Android later this year.

On desktop, the options for deleting searches are limited to setting history to auto-delete every three, 18, or 36 months (18 months is the default for new accounts), or deleting searches by hand. Google has said that it only tracks user search history to “personalize” their experience when the “Web and App Activity” setting is enabled. Adding a way to instantly delete history is great for peace of mind, but it also means that users can get some of the benefits the people who’ve taken the time to mess with their settings receive, without doing the extra work. This new feature can be thought of as an emergency “oh no” button for terrible, embarrassing, or just plain private searches. Google also offers the option to password protect your search history.

You can now slide into people’s Clubhouse DMs! The audio-only social networking app Clubhouse has launched its new direct messaging feature called Backchannel. As per The Verge, the new feature will be available for all users on both iOS and Android. To start a DM or Backchannel, you have to find a paper airplane-like icon on anybody’s profile page or swipe right from the main menu. Presently, the feature does not allow users to delete messages, so send messages carefully. For now, users can chat one-on-one, in groups, and send links. They cannot yet send images or videos, but a spokesperson said that functionality is coming, along with a “few other features.” There will also be an optional secondary inbox where message requests will live.

The functionality is designed to help moderators chat among themselves during an active room; let people connect after an event; and broadly, foster text conversations that otherwise would have to take place in a separate app. This is a critical development for the app, which the company now said has been downloaded over 8 million times on Android devices with more than 500,000 rooms created daily. Its competitors, notably Twitter Spaces and Facebook Live Audio Rooms, both allow people to text chat while also running or participating in an audio conversation, so Backchannel brings Clubhouse more up to par and ensures users keep their conversations, and more of their social life, on the app. Recently, the company rolled out an update for its Android app which allowed users to add their Instagram and Twitter accounts to their Clubhouse profile. Clubhouse was launched last year and the service managed to gain a lot of popularity in one year. It was initially available only on iOS and expanded to Android recently.

YouTube Shorts, which is Goggle’s short-form video service and an obvious competitor to TikTok and other similar applications, has now started rolling out globally. According to Mashable, YouTube says the service will now be available in “more than 100 countries”, basically everywhere where the video platform itself is available. YouTube Shorts was officially launched in September 2020, featuring 15-second videos, the same time limit as TikTok, though TikTok later expanded maximum video length, first to one minute, and then, to three minutes.

The service was first made available to creators in India, then rolling out to the US in March 2021 and the UK in June. The primary advantage of YouTube Shorts over TikTok, for creators, is the ability to tap into YouTube’s massive library of audio content to include in their shorts. Other than that, the app, which is available on both iOS and Android, allows creators to tie multiple video clips together into one, speed control, and a timer and countdown to make capturing the right moment easier. As per Mashable, new features that are coming include automatically added captions, adding clips from the phone’s gallery to the Shorts camera, as well as the ability to add filters and effects, with more coming in the future.