Google Rebrands Blogger and Picasa to Make Way for Google Plus

It looks as though the efforts to bring together Google's services under the "Plus" umbrella might involve rebranding two of Google's longstanding products: Blogger and Picasa. Mashable's Ben Parr reports that the Blogger and Picasa names - not the products - will go away, as early as the end of the month. That timing will coincide with, according to Parr, the opening of Google Plus to the public.
As Parr points out, this won't be the first time that Google has rebranded products, particularly following acquisitions. The VOIP company GrandCentral, for example, became Google Voice after Google acquired it. Both Picasa and Blogger are acquisitions, although it's been almost a decade since they were bought by Google.
So why rebrand these two products now?

To help rebrand Google, in turn, as a social network.
Parr's reports, if accurate (Google has not responded to my request for a comment), are hardly surprising. The massive push around Google Plus seems to bring all the company's social elements under one site: mobile and video messaging (Huddle and Hangouts), relationship management (Circles), and photo-sharing (Picasa, soon to be Google Photos).

Bye Bye Blogger? Or Better Blog Integration?

Renaming Picasa clarifies the product's purpose; renaming Blogger, less so. Indeed, the report from Mashable seems to have set off quite a stir of nostalgia (in my Google Plus stream at least), as many of us have fond memories of the blogging platform from the earliest days of blogging's existence - whether we still use Google's blogging platform or not. Although many of us have moved on to other blogging tools - Tumblr or WordPress, for example - Blogger does remain one of the most-trafficked sites on the Web. For its part Google has been in the process of refreshing and updating the look to Blogger this year. However, removal of the Blogger brand would be a much bigger change than simply new templates.
Hopefully that change would also include integrating Blogger more fully into the Google Plus site, linking Blogger profiles with Google profiles and giving blog updates a prominent position. But that integration isn't something folks would like to see just with Blogger. Many early users of Google Plus are calling for the platform's integration with Google Docs and of course Google Apps accounts as well.

Rebranding Google

Those products, however, already fall into the Google naming convention. The other outlier, of course, when it comes to branding is YouTube. Parr says that Google has no plans to rebrand YouTube to Google Video (a good thing considering the fate of the actual Google Video earlier this year).
Bringing all the products into alignment with the same sort naming convention does help solidify the Google brand - search "plus" all these social, communication, and collaboration components. Whether or not this adds more fuel to the fire about supposed antitrust violations remains to be seen.

Spotify: Much-Hyped Years-Old European Music Service Enters Now-Crowded US Market

 

Is the European music streaming service Spotify finally ready to come to the United States? When U.S. Web users visit Spotify.com they see the above image along with a field below the banner where a they can enter an email address to request an invite.

Haven't we seen this before, though? Spotify has been rumored to be coming to the shores of the New World for at least two years. It made waves at SXSW in 2010 with a rumored launch in the third quarter last year. That never panned out. Spotify inked a deal with with Sonyin January of this year and as of mid-June it had deals with three of the four major U.S. music labels. The only hold-out was Warner Music. Has Spotify reached an agreement with Warner and cleared the final hurdle to bringing the service to the U.S.?

Spotify raised $100 million in mid-June and the question whether a U.S. launch was imminent. That appears to be the case, if the banner can be believed.
Spotify will likely be a freemium service in the U.S. just like it is in Europe. Users have a set amount of music they can listen to for free before bumping into a ceiling where they would have to pay. Spotify changed its terms of service in April, lowering the amount of music users can listen to for free. Users can listen to 20 hours of music per month for the first six months. After that, the limit is lowered to 10 hours.
Will that type of plan work in the U.S. where the music-streaming landscape is much more crowded and competitive? Pandora is a free music streaming service that recently had an IPO. MOG and Rdio are both streaming services that cost $10 a month and allow for customizable playlists. Spotify has a lot of cool features but will it be enough to win the hearts and minds of American users?

PrivacyVille: Zynga's New Game to Educate Users About Privacy

Zynga does games. That is the company's bread and butter. Zynga makes almost all of its money through Facebook. Facebook does not do privacy very well and often faces user backlash whenever privacy settings or options are changed. User backlash against Facebook is inherently bad for Zynga.
Zynga wants users to know that it cares about privacy despite what the Facebook mother ship is doing. Hence, Zynga has released a new "game" designed to teach users all about how the social gaming company treats user information, where it is stored and how it is used. Say hello to PrivacyVille.


Essentially, PrivacyVille is a cute guided tour through Zynga's privacy settings. There is not much actual "playing" involved with this game. There is an incentive to learning about Zynga's privacy policy as users can visit RewardVille to get zPoints.


"We think this is an important step in creating a recognizable interface to explain privacy, as opposed to the normal fine-print privacy statements you see on sites today. We want players to understand our policies, have fun while they learn about them, and most importantly, be incented to walk through the tutorial," Zynga wrote in an email.
There is a touch of irony here, of course. Facebook and privacy usually are not associated in the same sentence, unless there is some type of negative connotation. That goes double for when third-party application developers are added to the mix. This is a good move by Zynga to give away game points to teach users about privacy. The entire tour through PrivacyVille takes about five minutes and then there are a couple questions to answer at the end (to make sure you actually read the information in the tour) before sending the user to RewardVille.
What do you think of Zynga's attempt at transparency? Are you going to go get your zPoints by taking the PrivacyVille tour?

Apple's App Store Reaches 15 Billion Downloads, Android Market had reached 4.5 billion downloads

Why did Apple put out a press release today about reaching the milestone of 15 billion downloads? Maybe to distract you from the other news about how it just lost the rights to the term "App Store" in a high-profile lawsuit against top competitor Amazon.
Well, guess what? It worked! Look what our headline reads!
Still, it is an impressive number, and one that puts competing app stores to shame. And Apple had even more new numbers to reveal today, too.

Apple also said that there are now 425,000 apps available in the App Store, including over 100,000 native iPad apps, which have been downloaded by consumers in over 90 countries. It again noted that there are over 200 million iOS devices worldwide and Apple has paid out over $2.5 billion to developers to date.
Some of these numbers represent an increase over those revealed at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. At that time, Apple had reached 400,000 mobile apps, 90,000 of which were iPad-specific and 14 billion downloads.

Compared to Others

To put these numbers in context, Google said at its I/O conference in May that the Android Market had reached 4.5 billion downloads, and Google has seen over 100 million devices activated worldwide. Also at that time, Google was activating 400,000 Android devices daily. By the end of June, Google's Android chief Andy Rubin reported that daily activations had increased to 500,000 per day.
Google said, too, that there are over 200,000 apps in the Android Market. What it didn't want to tell you, however, is how many work on Android tablets. It's an embarrassing number that may be somewhere from 50 to 100, reports The New York Times.
As for Nokia, it's seeing over 6 million apps and content downloads per day, and more than 300,000 new Nokia accounts created daily. The Ovi store is now home to over 48,000 apps. Nokia also said that Qt developers can target more than 100 million devices now, and will be able to target 150 million more in the future, due to the Symbian smartphones Nokia intends to sell.
RIM is now seeing 3 million app downloads per day, the company announced in March, up from 1 million just under a year ago. And Microsoft's newcomer Window Phone reached its own milestone recently: 25,000 apps, up from 11,500 in March.

Facebook To Unveil Skype-Powered Video Chat Next Week

Facebook’s “awesome” announcement next week has been spoiled. The social network will reportedly be unveiling a Skype-powered video chat platform.
Facebook’s Seattle team was behind the new feature, according to TechCrunch. Skype and Facebook already have a serious partnership that integrated Facebook social data directly into the Skype client. Now it looks like Skype will be coming to Facebook.

This isn’t even the first time we’ve heard about Skype-powered video chat on Facebook. Rumors surfaced last year about such a product, but it never materialized.
The report is sparse on details about how it will work. Will it require a software download? Will it support group video chats? Undoubtedly it will be a major addition to the Facebook platform. Google+, the search giant’s answer to Facebook, launched with a group video chat feature, Google+ Hangouts. Google is seeing a lot of traction with the feature, but if Facebook can release a video chat product next week, Google+ Hangouts may not seem as revolutionary.