Skip to main content

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   Trends for Websites is no longer being updated though, which could be missed by people who use this tool to figure out what to blog about.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.

    Comments

    Popular posts from this blog

    How to share pictures from Google Photos, using shareable-links

    This article describes how to get a link to one ore more photos from your Google Photos collection, using the Shareable Link controls.   It also explains how to delete shareable links that you have made in the past Google Photos is a tool for managing picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here . Shareable Links are a new type of linking introduced in Google Photos, which let you easily share one or more pictures at the same time.   You can email them, or use them in tools like Facebook. When someone opens a shareable link, they see a display with the date, the name and picture of the person who is logged in to Google at the time, and all the pictures that are included in the same shareable link. If you want to use an image from Google Photos in a tool which cannot use shareable links, you need to find the URL for the photo, instead. How to get the shareable link for one photo in Google Pho...

    How to rename picture files in Picasa-desktop

    This article is about re-naming files from within Picasa-desktop, to provide SEO benefits for your blog. Picasa's desktop software is a good tool for organizing and editing photos on your local computer.   And it is still available for you to use, even though Picasa-web-albums has been replaced by Google Albums + Google Album Archive. For pictures that are important in your blog, I still recommend preparing them in a tool like Picasa-desktop and then uploading the finished versions to Google Photos before putting them into a post, because: The desktop tool has better editing tools (cropping, zooming, auto adjustment, adding watermarks) and Picasa-web-albums does. It lets you control the size of the uploaded file It's easier to ensure sure that you still have full-size files on my local machine for printing etc, as well as smaller, more optimized, copies to use on web-pages. Picasa-desktop folders have a very nice relationship with files and directories with the Windows file s...

    How to find the URL for a picture in Google Photos

    This article describes how to get the URL or internet address of a picture in Google Photos, and the difference between Google's shareable links and URLs. Google Photos is a tool that help bloggers (and everyone else) to manage their picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here . In Google Photos, there are two different types of web-address for a photo. One is the URL , and this can be used to refer to pictures from Blogger, or from other tools that want a link that just shows the photo, eg Twitter, Google Maps.  This is the traditional style of internet-address for a photo. The other is the shareable link.   This is what Google Photos provides from the Share function.   Shareable links can be used in Facebook, and other places where the photo that is being shared is displayed within a web-display, rather than just as a picture.   (Ref:   How to make and manage shareab...