Google Kills Off Adsense For Feeds And Other Services

The last few weeks have been very irritating for people who use Feedburner to handle the distribution of their RSS feeds. Google took note and it looks like the search giant is using the Feedburner-troubles to clean house.

In an announcement on the company’s blog, the impending demise of several services brought the sort of news Google product users have grown accustomed to in the last couple of years.

Top of Google’s kill list is AdsSense for Feeds, a service which allowed publishers to make money from their RSS feeds. Since Feedburner has become buggy, many believe this prompted the retirement of this service. Publishers will still be able to sue Feedburner URLs powered by Google but the writing is on the wall—soon these will be dead too.

As of October 16, the Classic Plus feature which allowed users to customize their Google.com background will go into early retirement. Google plans to turn off the service for good come November. Users who take advantage of free storage across Picasa and Google Drive will suffer when the two platforms are merged. Google Places Directory Android app has been removed from Google Play (the app store) and the site will be taken down later this year.

As usual there’s isn’t much by way of an explanation for many of the discontinued services. Users have become accustomed to the capricious nature of Google and its products and since many of the announced kill-offs aren’t hugely popular, I don’t expect to see much uproar.

Will you be losing any of your favorite Google products in the latest round of house-cleaning? Let us know below.