With the launch of Google+, it seems that Google is streamlining its properties to create a unified brand image by renaming two popular services, the photo-sharing service Picasa and the Blogger blog hosting service.
The two popular services will be renamed Google Photos and Google blogs, respectively, Mashable reports.
Of course, these products were not originally developed by Google, but were acquire when Google bought them. Blogger was originally developed by Pyra Labs before Google bought the company in 2003. (Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, incidentally, was part of the company.) Picasa was originally developed by Idealab in 2002 before being purchased by Google in 2004.
This moves seems to smack of Microsoft Naming Syndrome. Every Google product has to have the name “Google” in front of it: Google+, Google Documents, Google Image Search. As with Microsoft, it appears that Google is afraid that people will forget that Google developed these products. But every company wants people to know their names, and Google has become one of the biggest names on the Web, and for good reason.
Of course, some people will inevitably not like the changes that Google’s making, as lots of people always complain whenever Facebook changes their layout. But the functionality appears to be staying, which is good, since Blogger and Picasa are excellent products with good futures for both of them ahead.
The only problem I can see is links that point to old Blogger URLs. I hope Google redirects links to go to the new Google Blogs. It’s actually technically trivial to do so.
Blogging and photo sharing are two of the building blocks of social networking, and Google already has tools for both, and integrating them with Google+ would be a great idea.
We’ve covered Google+ before, as well as Google’s previous failed attempts to unseat Facebook’s dominance of social networking, Google Buzz and Google Wave.
