Last week Google launched Google+, the company's attempt to pull social networking market share aware from Facebook and Twitter. While Google+ is currently only available to a very limited number of users, more and more features about the social networking project are being released, with the latest news being that Google-owned brands Blogger and Picasa will be phased out and restarted under the Google name. (Luckily, a bunch of us at pnosker.com have accounts and have been testing out Google+, so be on the lookout for a review article soon)
Blogger will be simply renamed as "Google Blogs", and Picasa will be renamed as "Google Photos". It seems simplistic, but Google's biggest asset (of course, other than its insane amount of user data), is its brand, so it makes sense that two main elements of social networking – blogs and photo uploads – are being rebranded under the Google name.
The rebranding is expected to take about a month, which should coordinate perfectly with the expected public launch date of Google+ of July 31st.
As of right now, Google+ is pretty bare-bones when it comes to features (sneak preview spoiler), but as other Google products are rebranded and incorporated into Google+, like Blogger and Picasa, the social networking service should pack quite a punch in its mission to compete with Facebook and Twitter.
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