On Friday, Google announced that they would be shutting down a number of their services including Google Listen, Google Video for Business, Google Apps for teams, and weeding out many of it’s blogs the company maintains for it’s products.
Google Listen was Google’s podcast app for Android. Google Listen disappeared from the Play Store on Thursday, but was still visible for those that had downloaded the app before. On Friday after the official announcement, the app was no longer visible at all. Google also said the app will continue to function properly until November 1st, then the search functionality will no longer work. Your podcast subscriptions can now be found in Google Reader under “Listen Subscriptions”. We hope that Google decides to add podcast support to Google Music, but if not there are plenty of other podcast apps out there for us to use.
Google Apps for Teams first came into our lives in 2008, but this collaboration tool hasn’t done so well in the past 4 years. Google’s Director of Engineering, Max Ibel said: “Google App as for Teams was not as useful for people as we originally anticipated,” which would explain why Google is dropping it come September. Starting September 4th, any existing accounts will be converted to personal Google accounts.
On to Google Video for Business, all the videos hosted on the video hosting and sharing platform will be migrated to Google Drive starting in October or November. The good thing is, the videos will not count against your space on your Google Drive. That’s really great news for those with tons of videos in Google Video for Business.
Google is also discontinuing some of its 150 blogs that it maintains for all of their services. Many of them are outdated or abandoned. We saw an example of this last week when Google launched the official Android blog, which replaced the Google Mobile blog. Most likely these abandoned blogs won’t be missed too much, as most of us didn’t know they existed anyways.
Yes Google does have a lot of services, and sometimes we hate to see them go. But this could make way for bigger and better services that did the same thing as Google Listen, Google Apps for Teams, and Google Video for Business. We’ll just have to wait and see what Google has up its sleeves.