Google To Kill Picasa, Blogger Brands In Push For Google+

Google may soon be killing off its Picasa and Blogger brands and integrating their services into Google+. The company's new social platform was just recently launched and has so far been very well received. It's still in an invitation-only trial stage, but plenty of folks have made it in, including rival Facebook's CEO.

Mashable first learned of this Picasa and Blogger rebranding news from an unnamed source. The two services are among Google's most popular and certainly won't be going away. Instead, Picasa will be rebranded as Google Photos while Blogger will simply be known as Google Blogs. It's believed that Picasa is already being used to power the photo stream in Google+. Other services will likely follow in the same path of rebranding, except for YouTube.

The source claims that the transition could take place within the next six weeks and that the public debut of Google+ should be on or before July 31. This date will also be when private Google Profiles will be deleted to encourage those users to join Google+ and use Circles to control their privacy. Google has yet to officially confirm this news.

[via Mashable]