Google has been shutting down a number of its side projects and businesses over the past several months, including services such as Google Buzz and Google Wave. Today, Google"s official blog site announced that even more projects and businesses will be shuttered by the company in the next few months.
Perhaps the project with the highest profile that will be closed soon is Picnik, the online photo editing web site. Google acquired the site in 2010, but today the company said, "We’re retiring the service on April 19, 2012 so the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products. You can download a zip file of your creations through Picnik Takeout or copy them to Google+. "
The good news is that Google has unlocked Picnik"s premium features from now until the site"s shut down. People who paid for the premium service will receive refunds.
Other services that Google will be closing includes the data management platform Needlebase, which will shut down on June 1. Urchin Software, a client based online web analytics product, will no longer be available after March 2012. The Social Graph API, which gives developers information about public connections between people on the web will be closed on April 20.
An email recovery product, Google Message Continuity, will have its supported ended in favor of Google Apps. Finally, Google Sky Map, an astronomy-based program, will be turned into an open source project.