Google product cancellations for December 2012

This quick-tip is about Google's winter 2012 product cancellations, which
appear to have less impact on most Blogger users than their recent seasonal purges.

Today, Google have announced their next round of discontinued products - they used to call it "spring cleaning", but this time around have at least acknowledged that it's winter for half the world, and summer for the other half!

Some Google Calendar features are to be discontinued, specifically:

• Creating new reservable times on a Calendar using Appointments Smart Rescheduler
• Add gadget by URL.
• Check your calendar via SMS/text message
• Create event via SMS/text message (GVENT).

My guess is that this may affect some Blogger users, who have integrated a calendar with a blog. It's a fairly specialist area, so likely to be a small number.

There are a few other discontinued features, but I suspect they won't affect bloggers to much extent:

• Google Sync a tool giving access to Google Mail, Calendar and Contacts via Microsoft Exchange's ActiveSync protocol - discontinued, except for Google Apps for Business, Government and Education.
• Google Calendar Sync
• Google Sync for Nokia S60
• SyncML, a contacts sync service used by some older mobile devices.

• Issue Tracker Data API: a tool that lets client applications view and update issues on Project Hosting on Google Code via API feeds.

• Punchd an app that keeps loyalty cards on smartphones

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.