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Google just announced another mass termination of old services, including the final closing of Google Wave, the Google Gears browser extension, the Friend Connect service that predated Google+ badges, a bookmark-sharing service called Bookmarks Lists, and the Timeline search view that was quietly shut off earlier this month.

The announcement also describes the fate of Knol, a collaborative knowledge database like Wikipedia that never made it far off the ground. Google has been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to relaunch the service as Annotum, which is powered by WordPress. In addition to these Web services, Google also announced the end of its RE<C renewable energy research program.

Automattic has announced the launch of VIP support for Web hosts of WordPress blogs. This expands VIP hosting and support services currently available to VIP WordPress clients, who include media companies, sports leagues and Fortune 500 companies.

The new services include better support for major infrastructure, annual review of clients' entire WordPress hosting stack, an annual security audit and review of best practices and a one-day onsite training of clients' WordPress-focused staff. Pricing starts at $250,000 per year.

WordPress.com launched a new photo carousel feature today for its users. This full-size carousel view presents images as large as your device can display them. Readers can "like" a photo from a carousel in the same way they already do on Facebook.

The "like" feature on the photo carousel follows on the heels of WordPress notifications that look exactly like Google+. Earlier this year, WordPress.com added a comment panel to show the most active posts and commenters, and 'follow' buttons and subscription widgets for its Web and Android apps.

WordPress.com launched a new notification feature today for logged-in users. A box in the upper right corner of the toolbar now notifies WordPress bloggers when someone follows their blog or likes a post. It also allows the user to follow back those fans right from the toolbar.

This feature replicates the new, ubiquitous Google+ toolbar pretty audaciously. The only difference is that the WordPress notification badge is orange, whereas Google's is red. Is this formula really the best way to increase engagement, or whatever it is these free social services are trying to make us do?

WordPress has grown by leaps and bounds from its origins as a personal blogging platform. Despite the evidence, though, a lot of folks view WordPress as a CMS that's exclusively for blogs or small sites. So what if I told you eMusic is moving to WordPress for all its CMS needs? That's exactly what Scott Taylor talked about this year at WordCamp San Francisco.

Now, eMusic isn't the world's biggest site, but it's nothing to sneeze at either. It serves around 6 million visits per month and "billions of HTTP requests" and millions of page views. The site has 400,000 subscribers. If it can handle eMusic, odds are it can handle your site as well.

At the Web 2.0 Summit today, Federated Media Publishing and Automattic, parent company of WordPress, announced an agreement to provide advertising rights for U.S. WordPress.com bloggers. Over 24 million sites are hosted on WordPress.com, and users will now be able to opt into a topically targeted advertising program.

Federated Media positions WordPress advertising as a more focused alternative to social media buys. The campaigns are content-driven, offering sponsored content curation, sponsored posts and semantic conversation targeting for ads.

Sites across the Web created some amazing tributes to Steve Jobs over the last day. One of our favorites was our friends at Boing Boing, who overhauled the theme of their front page with a touching, nostalgic classic Mac look. The team at WordPress loved it, too, so they worked through the night to make a retro Mac theme for WordPress users, and they're giving it away for free.

On the main WordPress blog founder Matt Mullenweg writes:

We work harder and have higher standards because of the bar set by Apple's experiences, and I don't know what WordPress would look like today if not for the inspiration he gave all of us.

The WordPress community has a lot to be excited about this week. BuddyPress and bbPress have pushed out major new releases today. WordPress users looking for a simple way to enable forums and/or add social media features should take a look. The bbPress 2.0 release integrates forum features into any standard WordPress theme. BuddyPress 1.5 brings a better default theme and performance improvements.

WordPress has made a pair of announcements today focusing on reading rather than writing. Free WordPress.com sites now have a "small, cute, little" follow button in the bottom right corner for readers who are not logged into WordPress. This allows non-WordPress users to follow the blog by email. (Yes, disgruntled blogger, you can turn it off.)

In another announcement for Android users, WordPress for Android 1.5 is now available, and its major new feature is a blog reader for the WordPress blogs you follow. You can even follow non-WordPress blogs using RSS.

This time last year, we compared the growth of the two leading light blogging services: Tumblr and Posterous. The conclusion was that Tumblr had all but defeated its rival. All through 2010, Tumblr showed exponential growth. That has continued into 2011. Over the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per month to over 300 million now (according to Quantcast). Over the same period, Posterous has grown from about 7M visits per month to about 11M. So the gap has widened: a year ago Tumblr got 14-15 times more visits per month, now it's double that.

Tumblr is now so popular that its founder got invited to The White House and its logo acquired a fish jumping through it. Tumblr is also getting 12 billion page views per month, an estimated 8 times more than Wordpress.com.