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Google discontinues Listen podcast app, Google Apps for Teams, and Google Video for Business

Google discontinues Listen podcast app, Google Apps for Teams, and Google Video for Business

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Google's spring cleaning efforts have claimed a few more victims, including the Listen podcast app, Google Apps for Teams, and Google Video for Business.

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Every so often Google rifles through its old and outdated products and puts a few out to pasture — just last month the company shuffled the last vestiges of Google Video over to YouTube and performed the last rites for iGoogle. Now Google Apps for Teams has been put on the chopping block. It gave small teams and schools access to Google's enterprise services without requiring a larger, organization-wide adoption of of Google's services. Starting September 4th, Google will be turning Apps for Teams accounts into standard personal accounts.

Google has also discontinued its Android podcast discovery app Listen, explaining that the Play Store offers a wide range of alternatives. The app will continue to work if you've already got it installed, but the podcast search functionality will be disabled in November. The timing is a bit odd as Apple's own podcast app is barely a month old (though the initial response wasn't exactly glowing).

If your workplace took advantage of Google's Video for Business program, that's gone now too. All of the video files hosted there will be transferred over to Google Drive — Google says the files won't count against your existing drive quota. Finally, some of the 150 blogs that Google maintains will be culled; many of them have long been abandoned or eclipsed by more popular communications channels, so they likely won't be missed.