What Is The Fate of Google’s Blogger/Blogspot ‘blogging’ Platform?

Google Allo was an instant messaging mobile app by Google for the Android and iOS mobile operating systems, with a web client available on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. It closed on March 12, 2019.

Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google products like Google Drive, Blogger and YouTube. On October 8, 2018, Google announced it would be ending the consumer version of Google+ by the end of August 2019, later changing that date to April 2, 2019. However, the service was discontinued on April 2019.

Just recently, Google announced the part-shutdown of her email burning service, a service that was created 16 years ago. FeedBurner is a web feed management service that provides custom RSS feeds and management tools for bloggers, podcasters and other web-based content publishers. It was founded in 2004 and acquired by Google in 2007.

Started as an invite-only platform that was available in beta for Android and iOS, Google Shoelace was launched in 2019 to help people connect locally. However, the company sent out an email to all the users of the app saying that Shoelace will be shutting down on May 12th, 2020. The Shoelace team believes that the downfall of the social app was due to the customers reprioritising their life and work due to the COVID-19.

Neighbourly was first introduced in May 2018, which lets one explore their neighbourhood with help from local experts. In the same year, the company expanded it to some other cities. But eventually, it failed to strike a chord with the public and saw declined usage. The company announced that it would be shutting down its Neighbourly app on May 12th, 2020. In their statement, Google said that Neighbourly was their attempt at connecting people with neighbours and making sharing local information more human and helpful. But, the app did not add value, thus, it will be shut down to concentrate on other Google products like Google Maps Local Guide.

Google announced back in 2017 that it would eventually phase out Hangouts, but despite the announcement, it is still around. After much delay, Google plans to transition existing Hangouts (in the G suite) user to a new app called Hangouts Chat and Hangout Meet by June 2020.
Meanwhile, Google had earlier planned to shut the app down in October 2019 but delayed it. The company believes that some companies might need more time to transition from the G Suite.
In fact, the company provided an update where it introduced video meetings and introduced better group chats (which wasn’t there earlier) to help existing users to have an easier transition.

Google Cloud Print gave users the ability to print from any device, from anywhere, to any web-connected printer. Sadly, Google will be shutting down the product on December 31st, 2020.
It was to be swiftly replaced by Chrome OS, which already handles administrative tasks for printers that use CUPS. Although in the past, Chrome OS relied on Cloud Prints for its printing needs, it is still unclear why Google would want to move away from a multi-platform, cloud-based printing solution and rely on local, native hardware.

Adding to their line of products being shut down, Google recently announced that it would be abandoning Google Hire in September 2020. Google built the app to simplify the hiring process, with a workflow that is integrated into Google’s G Suite consisting of Search, Gmail, Calendar, Docs etc. The app was built for medium-sized businesses.

Google, in its statement, said that while Hire had been successful, they are going to shift their focus on utilising their resources on other products in Google Cloud portfolio.

In April 2020, it was announced that users will no longer be able to create new App Maker apps but can still edit and deploy existing apps.
Presently the existing apps continue to work even though the App maker is no longer active. Users need to revise their organisation’s App Maker application as it will stop working in January 2021, and users will no longer have access to them. The data stored in Cloud SQL will remain unchanged and continue to follow the policies established by GCP.

On 15th of May, 2021, at exactly 12.02 WAT (this might not be the accurate time it started, but that exactly was when I noticed the error from my end. I did also received complaints from blogspot users including Kosebinu Roqeeb – ceo of Wapkosh Media during this same timeframe, he drew my attention to tons of tweets on Twitter and that made me cocksure it’s a general issue), Blogspot began malfunctioning.