As Google continues to test out its newly launched Google+ social networking service, a new report today claims that Google will soon rename two of its long running divisions as a way to help out the Google+ branding.
There is more pointing to Google getting ready to go on a massive rebranding of their existing product suite. According to a post by Mashable, Google intends to get rid of several non-Google name brands and rename them as Google products. The moves are apparently part of a larger effort by Google to attempt to unify its brand in preparation for when Google+ goes public. The services themselves aren’t going away of course, I mean Picasa and Blogger are two of Google most popular products with Blogger is one of the Top 10 most visited websites in the world.
Picasa will be renamed Google Photos and Blogger will be Google Blogs. The rebranding makes sense, as users of these services — Picasa in particular — may be unaware that they’re using a Google product. The expected integration of Picasa and Blogger with Google+ will likely coincide with the upcoming public launch of the social networking service, Google will publicly launch Google+ to the general public July 31.
Blogger service Launched in 1999 by Pyra Labs, it was later purchased by Google in 2003 and is still one of the most popular ways for people to launch their own blog sites. Google has since made many improvements to Blogger but in 2010 announced that all blogs made with Blogger must be hosted on Google’s servers. Picasa was launched in 2002 by IdeaLab and lets its users view, organize and edit photos. Picasa was acquired by Google in 2004 and is now a free download.
Not sure about the transition, but it will be within the next two months. So what do you think, is this a good move by Google?
*[UPDATE]*
GigaOM is reporting via an unnamed Google spokesperson that the company in fact has no such plans to get rid of the Blogger name for its blog division.
Google continues to improve and add new features for its users. Indeed earlier this week the Blogger interface got a major overalls. It’s now available on its Draft web page. It has improvements in checking out a blog’s traffic stats and also how much money you have earned via Google’s ad program. There are also improvements in creating posts themselves.