According to Ben Parr at Mashable, Google intends to rebrand several of their popular products, including the Picasa photo manager software and their Blogger product. Picasa will become “Google Photos”, while Blogger gets renamed “Google Blogs”. The word is other products will be renamed as well, but Google intends to leave YouTube alone. (They already had a product named “Google Video”, but shut that streaming video service down in May.)
This follows the naming scheme Google has used with products they acquired in the past, including JotSpot, which wound up being renamed “Google Sites” in 2008, and the GrandCentral voice-mail and phone forwarding system, which they renamed “Google Voice” in 2009.
These changes are expected to happen in approximately 4– 6 weeks, which coincides with the timing of the official release of Google+. The Google+ beta already has photo-handling technology built into it, but it is believed to be based on Picasa’s code. Functionality of Blogger seems like a logical choice to integrate with Google+, because it ties in with social networking.
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