Google Killing Off a Few More Products in Some Late Fall Spring Cleaning

Google said on Friday it has a little more spring cleaning to do, announcing it would kill off several more products beyond those put on the chopping block in July.

The latest crop of products slated for extinction includes AdSense for RSS news feeds, reward “badges” in Google News and a service that let people upload their own photo to use as a background for Google.com searches. Google also is tweaking how much storage it allots to both free and paid Google Drive accounts.

In the past users could get 5GB on the storage service and another 5GB for Picasa photos. Now both will come from the same account.

Leaving aside the question of whether late September qualifies as spring cleaning, the regular pruning of less popular products would seem to allow the company an opportunity to make sure it doesn’t get spread too thin.

Google said that with the latest list, it will have gotten rid of some 60 services since the cleaning started last fall. Products that have gotten the ax over the last year include iGoogle, Google Desktop and Fast Flip.

“Technology offers so many opportunities to help improve users’ lives,” Google said in its blog post announcing the changes. “This means it is really important to focus or we end up doing too much with too little impact.”