Google to shut down podcast app Listen, Video for Business & Apps for Teams

Search giant Google has been shutting down products or merging them with existing ones (as features) for quite some time now. In fact, over the past one year, the company made changes to around 50 products, features and services, and it has now announced a few more shutdowns. These include:

Google Listen: Launched through Google Labs in August 2009, 'Listen' allows users to find and listen to podcasts. It has been discontinued as the company feels that people now have access to a wide variety of podcast apps, especially with Google Play in force. Users who have already installed the app can still use it, but after November 1, 2012, the podcast search won't function. Users can access their podcast subscriptions on Google Reader in the 'Listen Subscriptions' folder and download the podcasts from import/export tab.

Google Video for Business: A video hosting and sharing solution for customers of Google Apps for Business and Education – enabling them to use video for internal communication. All videos hosted on Google Video for Business will be migrated to Google Drive and the migrated videos will be stored for free (it will not be counted against a user's Google Drive storage quota).

Google Apps for Teams: Introduced in 2008, it allows people with verified business or school e-mail addresses to collaborate by using non-email apps from Google, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. Beginning September 4, 2012, the company will start converting existing Google Apps for Teams accounts into personal Google Accounts and subsequently, shut it down. The change will not affect other editions of Google Apps.

"Google maintains 150+ blogs and other communications channels about our products and services, and so over time, we'll also be closing a number of Google-created blogs that are either updated infrequently, or are redundant with other blogs. This doesn't mean that we'll be sharing any less information – we'll just be posting our updates on our more popular channels," wrote Max Ibel, director of engineering at Google, in an official blog post.

The company had earlier announced the closure of its personalised homepage iGoogle, video search engine Google Video, Google Mini, Google Talk Chatback and Symbian search app, among others.