Jul 6, 2011 08:05 GMT  ·  By

Google+ is really a concentrated effort. The company is fully behind the project and it will encompass all of Google's products, where feasible. That's the plan at least and Google seems to be very determined about it if reports that it plans to retire the Picasa and Blogger brands, in favor of the generic-sounding Google Photos and Google Blogs.

According to Mashable, Google plans to drop the separate brands for many of its existing products and bring them in line with the regular Google nomenclature. Most products with unique names come from acquisitions.

Picasa and Blogger are the most prominent products to get a new, blander name, but other products will be affected. YouTube is not part of the renaming scheme though.

Neither the Picasa nor the Blogger name have long to live, they will be dropped within a month or a month and a half.

Even more interesting is the fact that the report claims that Google plans to open up Google+ to the public by the end of the month, so the name change could coincide with that, or fall very close to that date.

What's more, private Google Profiles will be deleted on July 31, lending more credence to the date as being a major turning point for Google.

It makes some sense to rebrand the Google products. Picasa has been rather neglected ever since Google has acquired it. It saw quite a lot of usage, but its social components are weak.

With Google+, which relies on Picasa for photos, the photo sharing and hosting service changed quite a lot. While regular Picasa users have 1 GB of free storage, Google+ users get to upload as many photos as they want, though all images will be resized if they're larger than 2048 x 2048 pixels.

What's more, there is no mention of Picasa in Google+ whatsoever. This oversight makes more sense if the Picasa name is being dropped. A rebranding for what is essentially a new product may actually be a good thing.

For Blogger though, a rebranding may be a tougher sell. While it may not see the usage it once saw, it's still a top 10 web property and many people are quite attached to the name and the brand.

Of course, Google could be preparing bigger changes for Blogger as well, a massive redesign is already coming, and it's not inconceivable that Google+ would be woven into the new Blogger, for example having Google+ replace the profile pages or even the comments, in the way the Facebook Comments box works.