Mountain View, California — Global search engine giant Google has once again grabbed its digital broom and embarked on another round of “spring cleaning” last week, announcing plans to discontinue several minor features, services, and apps its patrons no longer use with great frequency and to consolidate storage offerings across Drive and its Picasa photo-sharing service.
Fall may have arrived, but Googles’ year-old “spring cleaning” aimed at sweeping out unpopular, outdated or unneeded features at its online properties. That is the euphemism Google uses for products that it no longer plans to support. “It is really important to focus or we end up doing too much with too little impact,” Google senior engineering director Yossi Matias said in a blog post.
Starting on Tuesday, it will start retiring AdSense for Feeds. It will close completely on December 3. Publishers can still use Feedburner URLs powered by Google. Also, among the numerous services being chopped out are: Spreadsheet gadgets, the Android app “Places directory,” the quasi-gamification Google News Badges, and Classic Plus, which allowed users to upload their own background images on Googles homepage, and a combination of one’s free storage across Google’s Picasa and Drive services.
Notably, the executive explained the purpose behind the move, “Technology offers so many opportunities to help improve users’ lives. This means it is really important to focus or we end up doing too much with too little impact. So today we are winding down a bunch more features–bringing the total to nearly 60 since we started our ‘spring’ clean last fall,” wrote Google’s Matias, in a blog post Friday.
Also, beginning October 16, Google users will no longer be able to add customized backgrounds to Google.com via the company’s “Classic Plus” feature. Additionally, in November of 2012, the main Google page will revert to that-which-everyone-else-sees, instead of whatever customized image you have previously uploaded to use as a background. As far as aesthetically pleasing search goes, Bing wins this round.
Apart from company’s plans to mash together storage for Picasa and Drive means that users will now be given an allotment of free data over the course of the next few months. “Users will have five GB of free storage across both services,” the company says. “If you are paying for storage, your free storage will now be counted towards your total. So if you buy a 100GB plan, it will give you 100GB of total storage instead of adding to what you already had. We believe this approach will make it much easier for users. For both free and paid storage, people at or near their current storage limits will have the same amount of storage after this change.”
Apparently, as for those who turned to Google’s News Badges as a means for validating their noses for news, Google’s official discontinuing the gamification-like icons that would previously indicate one’s appreciation for a particular type of news — like a “Harry Potter” badge, if all you do is read articles about the boy wizard. Voracious readers could earn badges across five different enthusiasm tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and the not-quite-a-metal, “Ultimate” ranking.
Last, but not least, Google is discontinuing +1 Reports in Webmaster Tools, so everyone can focus on social reports in Google Analytics. Read Google’s full announcement here.