For the past year or so, Google has been slowly shutting down a number of its previous services and side businesses. The last such "spring cleaning" announcement was made in early August. Today, Google revealed that it has closed, or soon will, quite a few of its services.
A new post on Google's blog has the details on the changes. One of the biggest ones concerns the amount of cloud storage service that users of its Google Drive and Picasa will have access to in the future. The post states, " ... users will have five GB of free storage across both services. If you’re 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 adding to what you already had."
Google will also begin to shut down AdSense for Feeds next week and it will shut down completely on December 3. This feature let websites earn some extra income by putting in ad banners in their RSS feeds. Google will also close Classic Plus, which allowed users to upload a photo as a background when they checked out Google.com. No more new photos will be allowed starting in mid-October and it will close completely in December.
Other services that have been shut down include removing the Places Directory Android app from Google Play, merging Insights for Search and Trends for Websites into one Google Trends service and turning off Spreadsheet Gadgets in Google Spreadsheets sometime in 2013.
Source: Google blog | Image via Google
19 Comments - Add comment