Google product cancellations for October 2012

This Quick-Tip is about the products that Google is dropping, or making changes to, from October 2012.

Google's latest announcement about retiring products came out yesterday (Saturday). Seems odd that they're calling it "spring cleaning", since it's autumn / fall in most of the countries where major Google products are based.

So what's on the list that will affect Blogger-users?

AdSense for Feeds is being switched off - this has never been much of an earner for me, but I guess it could be significant for some people who have very large subscriber audiences. There's one line that worries me a little ""Publishers can continue to use FeedBurner URLs powered by Google, so they won’t need to redirect subscribers to different URLs." - it's saying "no change to Feedburner", but I wonder why they feel the need to say this.

Storage limits in Picasa and Google Drive "will be consolidated over the next few months" - we get five gig of free storage across both products, not in each one. But on the plus side, people who've paid for storage in one of these services will be able to use it in either of them.

No new Google News Badges will be issued from mid-October, and there will be no more Recommended Sections. I don't know these products well, but they may be relevant for people who have built a blog that shows news feeds.

Insights for Search has been merged into Google Trends, and expanded to cover more countries. Trends for Websites is no longer being updated though, which could be missed by people who use this tool to figure out what to blog about.

+1 Reports in Webmaster Tools are being removed, because Google Analytics has better tools. I'm guessing that any bloggers who are seriously tracking their +1 performance will be using Analytics anyway.

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