Picasa Web Albums

Mashable has learned that Google is planning to kill two of its biggest branded products and merge them into Google branded services in the next six weeks.

According to two sources familiar with the matter, Google intends to rename Picasa “Google Photos” and Blogger will become “Google Blogs.” Several other Google brands are likely to be affected, though our sources made it clear that YouTube would not be rebranded.

Mashable notes that the move isn’t without precedent – Grandcentral became Google Voice, Jotspot became Sites, etc. etc.

Blogger (co-founded by Evan Williams of Twitter) was acquired in 2003 and is one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world.  Picasa is also a very popular service acquired in 2004.

Both services will likely be tied in with Google’s new Plus Social Network.  It would be surprising to see Picnik survive as a separate product.   ‘Google Photo Editor’ anyone?

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In correspondence with Google’s release of Plus, Google has released a new service called Google Takeout. Google Takeout allows users to take their data out of the cloud from a few of Google’s products. The products so far included in Takeout are Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa Web Albums, and Profile. The data from these sites are put in a small .zip file, and inside you’ll be able to view your data. This service is directly related to Google’s Data Liberation Front. What a nice little tool, Google.

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