Google announced plans today to retire the location reporting and tracking service Latitude—and the company will instead encourage customers to direct their geolocation-reporting energies to Google+. Judging by Google's recent activity, this "Attack of the Google+ Blob" is far from over.

To the Internet's shock and dismay, Google also killed off Reader on July 1. Google's initial reasoning was that the service has been little-used. Google later explained that it thinks Reader is actually no longer a fit for the times we live in, where people can simply be Google+ users instead and get their news from their social media feeds, subscribe to brand pages, and forget their RSS salad days.

Google announced back in June 2011 that it had a cryptic but benign-sounding plan to put "more wood behind fewer arrows." This meant less effort on kooky Google Labs inventions, better user experiences, and more iterations on products people actually use. Well, make that "products Google wants people to use"—notably, Google+.

Now that Latitude is on the chopping block, Google is no doubt setting its sights on even more products that it would like to eliminate in favor of unifying more users under the Google+ banner. Here are a few likely candidates.

Groups

Google Groups was reduced to little more than an archive of e-mail conversations years ago, when it removed the ability to have welcome messages, pages, or files maintained on a group page. Now, the service is used exclusively for sending updates among friends and co-workers either in real time or as periodic digests. The interface is about as bare-bones as it gets, effectively just a stand-in for an e-mail address accessible by a group of people.

It wouldn't be too hard for Google to roll this into Gmail instead, but the obvious Google+ analog is "circles." Users could designate a circle as addressable by its members and store all messages in a threaded forum-like interface, possibly with an attached Hangout for members to live chat with one another.

Circles could be public or private, more like actual forums or private e-mail chains. The format would certainly make it easier to share media among groups, though the potential anonymity of Groups would be harder to maintain in circles.

Voice

It's strange and dismaying how Google has left Voice. The company acquired GrandCentral back in 2007 and relaunched its service as Google Voice in 2009, allowing users to register a new phone number and receive calls and messages through a Web interface. This also produced hilarious and wholly inaccurate transcriptions of voicemails.

But no one uses voicemail anymore, and while a second phone number is nifty, it’s still a cumbersome route to circumventing traditional text and phone call charges. Apple has trounced Google when it comes to integrating its own ubiquitous message service with the same SMS interface and making it available on multiple platforms. While Google has Talk-turned-Hangouts, its Voice service isn't seamless enough to compete on iMessages' level when it comes to messaging.

Google also announced this morning that it was adding voice calling to Hangouts, and that Hangouts is "the future of Google Voice"—i.e., say your goodbyes. Google could take this a step further and thread messages to phone numbers (including Google-provided numbers) together into one interface, using a person and their profile as the target rather than an e-mail address or number. The same could be done with voice-only hangouts.

While Google’s voice recognition technology has certainly developed (as shown by Google Now), Google Voice has yet to get a piece. Google could abandon the voicemail transcription aspect, but the company also appears equipped to revamp it if it sees fit.

Search

In these browser-based search times we live in, when no one ever closes their browser and homepages hardly matter, it’s hard to see much point in the Google search homepage. Even looking at it now, the Google homepage and search results page looks and feels like old-Google compared to the style Google is affecting on Google+.

Done the wrong way, this could easily be killing Google’s golden goose, so it’s the biggest “if” in this list of Google+ absorptions. Google no doubt makes plenty of money from ads and sponsored placement in its search results, and those things would be hard to integrate seamlessly into the way we see Google+ now.

But ads can become classy-looking “sponsored” spaces, similar to what Facebook is doing in its News Feed. That’s a potential way forward for Google, a way forward we probably never want to see come to fruition, ever, but a way forward nonetheless.

This is not to say that Google’s good search results on, for instance, “Game of Thrones” would be shunted to the bottom of a page in favor of your friends’ status posts (“GoT finale was so good OMG”). Google could still favor Web results inside a Google+ interface. But a more Facebook-like "Graph Search," maybe with inverted priorities, could be the result of a Search-Google+ union.

Google search is only two simple elements: a field and the results. To simply plop that field into Google+, imbue it with all the power the field on the homepage has right now, and make search results appear below your profile picture and alerts… that’s not so hard to imagine. In fact, the Google results page already has exactly those elements, just in smaller format than Google+. Likewise, a browser search-field query that takes you to plus.google.com and throws some social-media type results into the mix… not so hard to imagine either.

Google Latitude is set to get the axe on August 9. Any guesses on what other services might be next? Your speculation is as good as ours.