RIP, Google Reader. Google's March 2013 product cancellation summary.

This QuickTip is about Google's March 2013 (spring for them) product retirements, and how they affect Blogger users.

For a while, every time the season changes Google have announced a set of product retirements. This quarter's announcement is just out, and you can find it here.

In short, the changes are:

• Apps Script will stop supporting GUI Builder and five UiApp widgets from September 16, 2013.

• CalDAV API only be available to whitelisted developers, from September 16, 2013. Us Google Calendar's API, instead.

• Google Building Maker will be retired on June 1 2013.

• Google Cloud Connect won't be available from April 30 (use Google Drive's desktop app instead).

• Google Reader stops working on July 1, 2013, Export your subscriptions and use another company's RSS feed-reader. (No recommendations given)

• The Google Voice App for Blackberry won't be supported from next week. (Use Google's HTML5 app with Blackberry version 6 and over instead.)

• The Search API for Shopping, is depricated now and will be turned off on September 16, 2013.

• Snapseed Desktop (Macintosh and Windows) is no longer available for purchase. Existing customers can still download the software and ask for support. (No alternatives recommended, the Snapseed mobile app on iOS and Android is still available free.)

As far as I can see, none of these will have a big impact on people as they use Blogger to maintain their blogs.

But personally I will miss Google-reader: I use it to keep up with the many blogger-helpers that I read, in order to stay on top of what's happening with Blogger overall and to spot areas that need more investigation.

And it worries me that Google are no longer offering a human-useable RSS-feed-reader (ref What is RSS and why does it matter for bloggers?).   Does it make it more-likely that Google will shut down Feedburner in the future? That would hurt a lot of Blogger-users.

Wanted: a Google-reader replacement

Many bloggers, including me, will be looking for a replacement feed-reader.

Recommendations welcome, please leave a comment below!

Google product cancellations for December 2012

This quick-tip is about Google's winter 2012 product cancellations, which
appear to have less impact on most Blogger users than their recent seasonal purges.

Today, Google have announced their next round of discontinued products - they used to call it "spring cleaning", but this time around have at least acknowledged that it's winter for half the world, and summer for the other half!

Some Google Calendar features are to be discontinued, specifically:

• Creating new reservable times on a Calendar using Appointments Smart Rescheduler
• Add gadget by URL.
• Check your calendar via SMS/text message
• Create event via SMS/text message (GVENT).

My guess is that this may affect some Blogger users, who have integrated a calendar with a blog. It's a fairly specialist area, so likely to be a small number.

There are a few other discontinued features, but I suspect they won't affect bloggers to much extent:

• Google Sync a tool giving access to Google Mail, Calendar and Contacts via Microsoft Exchange's ActiveSync protocol - discontinued, except for Google Apps for Business, Government and Education.
• Google Calendar Sync
• Google Sync for Nokia S60
• SyncML, a contacts sync service used by some older mobile devices.

• Issue Tracker Data API: a tool that lets client applications view and update issues on Project Hosting on Google Code via API feeds.

• Punchd an app that keeps loyalty cards on smartphones

Google product cancellations for October 2012

This Quick-Tip is about the products that Google is dropping, or making changes to, from October 2012.

Google's latest announcement about retiring products came out yesterday (Saturday).   Seems odd that they're calling it "spring cleaning", since it's autumn / fall in most of the countries where major Google products are based.

So what's on the list that will affect Blogger-users?

AdSense for Feeds is being switched off - this has never been much of an earner for me, but I guess it could be significant for some people who have very large subscriber audiences.   There's one line that worries me a little ""Publishers can continue to use FeedBurner URLs powered by Google, so they won’t need to redirect subscribers to different URLs." - it's saying "no change to Feedburner", but I wonder why they feel the need to say this.

Storage limits in Picasa and Google Drive "will be consolidated over the next few months" - we get five gig of free storage across both products, not in each one.   But on the plus side, people who've paid for storage in one of these services will be able to  use it in either of them.

No new Google News Badges will be issued from mid-October, and there will be no more Recommended Sections.   I don't know these products well, but they may be relevant for people who have built a blog that shows news feeds.

Insights for Search has been merged into Google Trends, and expanded to cover more countries.   Trends for Websites is no longer being updated though, which could be missed by people who use this tool to figure out what to blog about.

+1 Reports in Webmaster Tools are being removed, because Google Analytics has better tools.   I'm guessing that any bloggers who are seriously tracking their +1 performance will be using Analytics anyway.