

iGoogle switched off - benpink
http://google.com/ig
The day has come and iGoogle is no more.
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cromwellian
iGoogle IMHO was just following the "Portlet" fad that seem to infect many
portal sites. I think Google Now is a much better interface for this kind of
stuff, if only it were "extensible" the way iGoogle gadgets were.

I wouldn't call it a product, more like a feature. Google has literally
changes thousands of features of their search page over the years. Maintaining
them all without ever sunsetting would be an unimaginable technical debt.

This brings up the usual Reader meme, but even Apple unceremoniously kills
features in products they charge money for and profit from. Remember the Final
Cut Pro vs Pro X debacle? Or iMovie? Sometimes companies just decide its time
to revamp a product and remove features that are no longer popular, or just
poorly designed. Paying for a product does not protect you from that if you
are a minority of users. Well, maybe it does, Microsoft seems to just keep on
piling on features in its products without ever removing them.

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bane
Good, now I have almost no reason to go to Google's site at all. Between this,
Reader and the useless G+, google's web properties have gone almost completely
off the rails.

I utterly fail to see why shutting this down was a good idea.

I hit my iGoogle page dozens of times a day and would have put up with ads and
all manner of garbage on it because it was so useful.

Outside of My Yahoo (which was recently updated thank goodness), any other
alternatives?

~~~
jwarzech
Full disclosure I'm the founder of this product (hey its hacker news) but a
lot of people have been using [http://backstit.ch](http://backstit.ch) as an
alternative rather than a direct replacement for iGoogle (and google reader).

Rather than just show snippets from different sites we analyze the content so
you can easily filter or even create automatically curated pages around your
favorite topics.

You can check out a topic page without signing up here:
[http://backstit.ch/topics/117/TrackingFukushimaDisaster](http://backstit.ch/topics/117/TrackingFukushimaDisaster)

~~~
prostoalex
I don't like the "river of news, most current at the top" UI, but I did use
iGoogle's "bunch of boxes with headlines, spread around in a bunch of columns"
approach, do you guys have that as an option? Looks more like Google Reader
replacement than iGoogle.

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alan_cx
iGoogle used to be my home page.

Now this is: [http://www.ighome.com/](http://www.ighome.com/)

Which (cant remember) either I set up for DDG or, it was the default. So,
while I do find myself !g ing a lot, google is no longer my default for
anything.

So..... Yahoo for mail, as I have had the email address for something like 15
years DDG has been my default search for several months Then switched from
iGoogle more months ago because of the obvious Did have a G+ account thing,
simply because it was where a few vaguely interesting groups are, or were. But
I only ever looked at it if I was notified via iGoogle. So, guess what? Not
looked at that in months either.

Um....so... yeah, well done google. I assume Im not worth enough to them.
Hell, turns out, google isnt worth much to me either.

What happened to the cool kids on the internet block, aye?

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nrser
start-ups are supposed to pivot like shit. gorillas are supposed to keep the
lights on forever.

i know it's not that simple. at least start-ups have a reasonable option of
open sourcing failed products. i don't know how often that works out, but it
offers some consolation. gorillas have a much harder time. who knows what a
service was hooked in to, what it was built off and what was was built off it.

it makes me think along a line i've thought many times. a friend once said
"you either become a big company or a part of a big company". which means you
either become a core service at a big company or part of a core service at a
big company. or you're dead. a lot of services are going to get a bullet.

accept for a moment that is the right decision, scrappy start-up or goliath.
there is obviously still value in a lot of these services to a lot of people.
maybe they can't become big businesses. maybe they can't be important to big
businesses. but they can still be important to many people, some of them with
the capability to develop and run them.

when will open source extend to services? beyond libraries, and into
applications themselves? services with open, distributed development and
hosting. built and run by the community, for the community. the things
happening with distributed data storage have to help, and a lot of the work
going into making mobile applications efficient and responsive (every phone is
a node in a network that is constantly being partitioned). it seems like this
could open the door for a lot of things that don't really fit the "hit or
quit" model.

------
IBM
If you haven't learned to not use a Google product that isn't core to their
revenue stream in the year 2013, I don't know what to tell you.

~~~
UntitledNo4
I don't know if it's that straigh-forward as "not core to their revenue
stream". At the time it launched I guess it was supposed to be part of their
core revenue stream -- it was supposed to give them more insight into what
their users are into, and thereby allowing them to target their ads better.
Not too different to Google+, I guess, just a different wrapper. I think the
problem here was that it didn't catch on as well as they wanted it, and even
people I know who were using it, moved on after a while.

So, I guess it would be more correct to say that you shouldn't use Google
products that aren't going to be popular enough. Unfortunately I don't have
such an insight into the future.

~~~
IBM
The answer is simple, you wait until they are monetizing it and are clearly
going to support the product into the future. No one is forcing you to be an
early adopter.

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stefanlyager
Too bad... it was a great service.

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caryhartline
I never understood the name "iGoogle". You know what the "i" in Apple's
products and many other company's products mean? Internet. So Google called
the product "Internet Google".

~~~
1angryhacker
the i in apple's products make no sense either

~~~
savszymura
I think in their minds it was about the expression of ones identity, and
showing that you're such and unique snowflake.

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djrconcepts
I was a huge fan of igoogle. No idea why this project shut down. The concept
was brilliant, but maybe the name conflicted with apple's ieverything.

~~~
wyclif
No, they created Google Now which overlapped with this product. Google is
constantly starting new projects and ending ones that either conflict with new
ones or become obsolete.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Except that Google Now is not for desktops or a 'start page' (at least not
yet), and perhaps more importantly, is not accessible or extensible by
developers, or customizable by users.

~~~
wyclif
I do think you have something there about desktop use. What's important here
is that Google adapted to the migration of users to mobile devices. Just like
desktop PCs are in decline, so are apps that are desktop-only.

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mythz
Sad I used iGoogle everyday.

What's a good alternative to iGoogle? i.e. that has weather, news feeds and
stock quotes on 1 page?

~~~
aw3c2
A local HTML page with frames that load some RSS feeds or mobile websites?

~~~
DanBC
Someone could make a little website that builds, from various templates and
widgets, a suitable page and allows the user to save it to local disk and set
it as their home page.

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neals
Been using it until yesterday. Loved it.

~~~
benpink
Same here. New tab > open home page > scan my iGoogle feeds has been a very
frequent and almost automatic habit of mine for years. When it redirected me
to a search page it took a good second or two for me to realise what was going
on.

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andyhmltn
Why they didn't at least migrate it to a similar format as Google Now
(branding wise) is beyond me.

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alistair3408
Shame

~~~
je42
What alternatives are you guys using ?

I currently use netvibes, but I am not too happy. The font is way too small
and non-configurable....

~~~
Steer
I switched over to [http://www.protopage.com/](http://www.protopage.com/) last
week, but I don't think you can configure the fonts easily there either so may
not be of interest to you. It works for me so far at least.

~~~
alan_cx
I tried them at the same time I was trying ighome.com. I liked it enough,
until the nagging for money started. It then became annoying, so I settled on
igHome. Less functional but less annoying.

