Google continues to merge, open-source, or phased out some of its products that haven?t achieved the promise the company had hoped for.

Focusing on the cloud with Google Apps, Google will end support for Google Message Continuity (GMC). Launched in December 2010, GMC is an email disaster recovery product designed for Google's enterprise customers. The service used Google's cloud to back up emails originally sent or received in an on-premise, Microsoft Exchange system. As businesses are moving entirely to the cloud with Google Apps, benefitting from disaster recovery capabilities built directly into Google's Apps, the company will phase out GMC.

Google Sky Map will be open-sourced. This app was created by half a dozen Googlers at the Pittsburgh office in their 20 percent time to show off the capabilities of the sensors in the first-generation Android phones and offer a window into the sky. Google will open-source Sky Map and will collaborate with Carnegie Mellon University in a partnership that will see further development of Sky Map as a series of student projects.

Google is also retitring the Needlebase data management platform, which the company acquired from ITA Software, on June 1, 2012. The company is evaluating the specific technology for integration into Google's other data-related initiatives.

Online photo editor service Picnik will be also retired on April 19, 2012. You can download a zip file of your creations through Picnik Takeout or copy them to Google+. Premium members will receive a full refund in the coming weeks.

Google's Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the web available for developers. The API isn?t experiencing the kind of adoption Google would like, and is being deprecated as of today.

In 2005 Google acquired Urchin, whose online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics. The company is now saying goodbye to the client-hosted version, known as Urchin Software. New Urchin Software licenses will no longer be available after March 2012.