Google's Blogger is here to stay

By Matt Weinberger | July 9, 2011, 5:23pm PDT
Summary

Despite the rumors, it looks like Google+ won’t be responsible for the demise of the Blogger brand.
Topics
Google Inc., Demise, Blogger, Matt Weinberger
Blogger Info
Christopher Dawson

By now, you’ve probably heard the rumors that Google’s retiring the Blogger and Picasa brands in favor of making everything Google+. But while Picasa’s fate remains uncertain, it seems that Google has no intention of letting Blogger fade away.

First off, the Blogger team has given the platform a massive makeover: Users of the so-called Blogger in Draft preview program now have access to an interface that fits right in with the recent changes to Google Search and Gmail.

Blogger in Draft, writes software engineer Jungshik Jang in the explanatory blog entry, is much like Google Labs, insofar as it’s designed for users to see what’s next for Blogger before the changes are finalized and made to be the default.

It seems unlikely that Blogger would really undergo this kind of widespread change if a rebranding really were imminent - it strikes me that they’d wait for that rumored renaming to “Google Blogs” before they mentioned word one about their plans for the interface.

And to further back up my viewpoint, GigaOM spoke to an unnamed source which affirmed that Google has no plans to kill off the decade-old Blogger brand. Given Blogger’s strong name recognition, it’s a small wonder.

Of course, neither GigaOM’s report, nor any other rumors that have crossed my feed, can account for the future of Picasa. Those original rumors had pegged Picasa as becoming “Google Photos” by the end of July, so we ought to know for sure sooner rather than later.

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