Hey! Hi! Hello! Yesterday afternoon for the first time in 14 months I was in our office with 6 of my coworkers. It was the most glorious thing. Several of us enjoyed it so much we continued on with dinner at the restaurant in our office parking lot which provided me with 6 nonstop hours of coworker time. I have missed them so much and it was pure joy to spend time with them. The sun is still shining, we welcomed a new member to the marketing team yesterday and my weekend is shaping up to be most excellent. I’m a very happy camper. Also on the good (ish) news front is word from Capitol Hill that lawmakers are taking up the lumber cause. Outside of that this week we’ll cover a little on the Google and the Twitters as well as more housing news and a Zoom announcement.
THE HIGHS ARE HIGH AND THE LOWS ARE LOW
The headline is admittedly lame but it’s really hard to be so punny each week. What I’m getting at in it though is that while housing starts were slow in April compared to March, home builder confidence stayed at a high of 83 in May. Right now is an odd time in the building industry but it seems like most builders feel like this is a market that will continue to be strong and there is hope that the rising supply costs will stop increasing and even begin decreasing in the future. It should be noted that just when that will happen remains unclear, but it does seem that the consensus is that it will indeed happen. With high prices and high demands, builders are doing things like capping sales, removing home prices from websites, and delivering the news to buyers that their homes might not begin being built for months to come.
DESKTOP IS NOT DEAD
Long live the desktop! We focus a lot here on mobile, it accounts for more than 60% of all web traffic after all. But the truth of the matter is, many people still use desktop and laptop computers on the regular (typing from one now). So with that understanding comes news this week that the Google Page Experience update will cover Desktop AND mobile traffic. This is a big update involving Core Web Vitals and it will have a significant impact on SEO. We’ve been paying close attention to this and will make sure to keep you informed as information becomes available and with anything that we notice when it actually rolls out next month.
TWEET, TWEEDLE-LEE-DEE
You all! It’s happening! A social media channel is gonna charge for premium service. This is one of those things that floats through the big channels as rumor all the time but in the case of Twitter, this time it’s real! It’s a subscription service called Twitter Blue and it will involve perks like undo send. In all honesty, I don’t use twitter because I find it to be overwhelmingly depressing and full of bots. But for heavy Twitter users, this subscription seems useful.
ALL I WANNA DO IS ZOOMY ZOOM ZOOM!
If you’ve ever had a video call with anyone on team ONeil, you know we are a Google Meets company. However Zoom is the Xerox of video conferencing so even we find ourselves saying, “I was on a Zoom”. Zoom is the defacto Queen of the video conference and they’ve just announced a new service called Zoom Events. Having just attended a zoom event yesterday in the form of the 2020 MBIA Max Awards (we won 4, cough cough, humblebrag), Zoom events sounds like a fantastic product that will combine a bunch of features to make virtual events even more engaging.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Have a great weekend and I’ll see you here next week!
