Friday, July 08, 2011

Google to shutter Blogger and Picassa

It looks like our home on Blogger.Com will become a casualty of Google's rebranding efforts as they gear up for the public launch of their social network, Google+. The blogging platform will be rebranded as Google Blogs, and rolled into their overall social strategy. In addition, Google's picture sharing product Picassa will also become part of the search giant's social network.

The move to fold older services into Google+ hints at why the new social network has the potential to become such a hit. Aside from the casual search engine users, a significant portion of Google's traffic uses their secondary products, most notably Gmail. With so many users accustomed to Google's product style, there is less of a barrier for new users to join +, especially with all of the fanfare around its launch. On the other hand, the failure of Google Wave suggests that buzz and brand loyalty does not guarantee success, and that even a powerhouse like Google can produce a clunker.

For more on this topic, check out Ben Parr's article on Mashable.

1 comment:

Sam said...

It is certainly an interesting move. I guess the key idea behind these moves is to create a 'unified brand' to truly compete with Microsoft and Facebook. It wants to educate people about what Google does apart from search...time will tell if it works!