Google Dumps Six Services, Including Picnik and Google Sky Map

Google has just announced the third wave of product retirements after retiring Google Buzz and Knol, Wave, Friend Connect and Google Gears previously. The official Google blog lists six products that will be discontinued in 2012 of which the majority of Internet and Google users probably never heard of.

Picnic is probably the services that most users have heard about. It is a photo online editor that Google acquired in 2010. Some of the functionality has since then been integrated into Google+ or other services. Users who open the Picnic website as of today will notice an announcement on top that states that the service will shut down on April 19, 2012.

Picnic premium features have been enabled for all users in the meantime, and premium users who paid for the extras will get a refund. Google notes that users can export their data using Picnit Takeout, a server that lets them download the photos to the desktop or copy them over to Google’s social networking service Google+.

Alternatives are Pixlr, Psykopaint and Aviary among others.

The five services that get dumped as well are:

• Google Message Continuity (GMC): An email disaster recovery product for Enterprise customers that “use Google’s cloud to back up emails originally sent or received in an on-premise, Microsoft Exchange system”. Google notes that while the service has seen hundreds of sign ups since launch, the cloud based Google Apps service offering a similar functionality has seen millions in that time. GMC customers can use the service until their contract expires. Google asks customers to consider moving to Google Apps instead.
• Google Sky Map: This product will be open-sourced which means that development will continue and availability is ensured.
• Needlebase: A data management platform that will be retired on June 1, 2012. Google is currently evaluating options to integrate the technology into other data-related products.
• Social Graphi API: The api, used to reveal public connections between people on the web, has been deprecated and will be fully retired on April 20, 2012.
• Urchin: This product became the foundation of Google Analytics. The client hosted version, known as Urchin software, is retired after March 2012.

It is likely that those six services are not the last that Google will retire in this year. What is your take on this? A much needed retirement of unprofitable services or something that was not really necessary at all?