New Delhi: Continuing its "spring cleaning" session, Google has announced to shut down some more services including AdSense for Feeds and Classic Plus. "It is really important to focus or we end up doing too much with too little impact. So today we're winding down a bunch more features—bringing the total to nearly 60 since we started our spring clean last fall," said Yossi Matias, Senior Engineering Director, Google, in a blog post.
Starting October 2, Google will begin retiring AdSense for Feeds feature, and on December 3 Google will close this feature. AdSense for Feeds was designed to help publishers earn revenue from their content by placing ads on their RSS feeds. Publishers can continue to use FeedBurner URLs powered by Google, so they won't need to redirect subscribers to different URLs," he said.
Starting from October 16, users won't be able to upload new pictures with Classic Plus, a Google Search feature that lets people upload or select images to use as a background on Google.com. Google will turn off this service in November 2012.
The company has also announced to consolidate consolidate Google storage in Picasa and Drive over the next few months. "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 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," he said.
Google will also slowly start turning off Gadgets in Spreadsheets next year, which were designed to allow people to add customised features to Google Spreadsheets.
Starting on October 15, Google will stop issuing and displaying Google News Badges, as well as showing Recommended Sections. However, people can still tailor their Google News experience by adding custom sections or adjusting the frequency with which news sources appear.
Merging Insights for Search into a revamped Google Trends, Google lets users now see search trends and compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties in a single place: google.com/trends. "We will no longer support Trends for Websites, which allowed people to compare traffic to and audiences of different websites," he said.
The Places Directory Android app that helped people find nearby places of interest has been removed from Google Play.
Google has also decided to discontinue +1 Reports in Webmaster Tools that help publishers measure +1 activity on their pages. "We'll be discontinuing the stand-alone +1 Reports on November 14," he said. This is has been done so that users can focus on social reports in Google Analytics.
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