
Google Shutdowns Continue: iGoogle, Google Video, Google Mini... - mjfern
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/google-shutdowns-continue-igoogle-google-video-google-mini-others-are-killed/
======
MattLaroche
Why not link to Google's blog instead of TechCrunch?

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-
su...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-summer.html)

~~~
Dylan16807
In general I agree, but when in the specific case of blogspot I dislike seeing
a blank white page when javascript is off.

~~~
GoodIntentions
Not even a "yo, dude this site needs javascript to work" message. Graceful
degra-what?

~~~
josteink
Just white.

<http://imgur.com/J2w2s>

------
martythemaniak
One way to look at all these shutdowns is that Google is on a hiring spree -
for every one of these zombie projects they kill they get a bunch of engineers
who are already vetted by Google's HR and are familiar with Google's dev
processes.

~~~
eagsalazar
How many people are honestly required to maintain iGoogle? Full time? One? Two
if they browse the internet most of the day.

Just leave it up for christs sake. I wonder if this isn't about forcing people
to other services.

Take the developers and let it keep going. No new commits, it works!

~~~
zitterbewegung
You are ignoring the cost of maintaining software. That is huge. "Working" is
a relative term.

~~~
eagsalazar
I'm not ignoring it at all. I'm just calling bullshit on the idea that the
cost is anywhere near "huge".

1 developer, 75% time. That's it. If they are north of 2 developers they are
doing something very wrong.

~~~
ams6110
Even granting your premise, who wants to be the ONE developer stuck working on
some project that clearly has no future?

~~~
praxulus
Indeed, 1 google developer is going to be north of $100K/year, and if you're
going to trust them to run a project, even a zombie one, probably
significantly higher. Even worse is the loss of their expert advice and
productivity on projects that actually deserve it.

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting that they are killing off iGoogle. One might hope there would be a
Gplus theme for that home page that would duplicate it.

In the mean time it seems like a really really easy way to get about 10M
uniques a month. I wonder if you implement an iGoogle clone on AE/CE and fund
it with AdSense ads would they ban you?

I love the synergy of keeping a Google product alive on Google infrastructure
but redirecting the money to someone willing to maintain it. Could be an
interesting test case.

~~~
beambot
iGoogle has been my homepage for some time and is my window into numerous
google properties (gmail, calendar, etc). This is an unwelcome change.

~~~
Torrents
I've used it for years as well. I have Gmail and Google Calendar widgets, one
for Hacker News, one for Reddit, and other news sites. It's a useful
aggregator for all of the resources I use on the Web. I'll have to find a
replacement before November of 2013.

~~~
fishbacon
I never found iGoogle too appealing because I find the interface messy, any
idea what draws you to it? Is it just that it contains a bunch of RSS data?

~~~
freehunter
Personally I use iGoogle daily simply because of the Gmail/Calendar
integration (don't need to open anything else to see those) right on the first
page I see when I open my browser. It allows me to start my day at one glance:
new emails, daily events, and RSS feeds of overnight news. When I switched to
it, I was previously using Netvibes. I switched because it loaded roughly 5x
faster than Netvibes.

There are some things I don't like about it. The header is gigantic. I wish I
could turn that off and add a few more feeds without needing to scroll.
iGoogle has also been breaking a lot lately. I actually removed my Gmail feed
simply because it never worked even though it was developed by Google
themselves.

I'm sad to see it go, but it's better than the sorry state it's been in for
the last few years.

~~~
Goronmon
_There are some things I don't like about it. The header is gigantic. I wish I
could turn that off and add a few more feeds without needing to scroll._

That's what Super iGoogle is for.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ncindhlccodninkgio...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ncindhlccodninkgiofmmjdidmcmllhd)

------
jroseattle
I find these types of actions as very important to the culture of the company.
It says we keep our house clean, we don't leave old things we tried lying
around, and we acknowledge that some things work and some don't.

It may be negligible in terms of workforce impact, but it sends a signal that
I think is very refreshing. Good for Larry, and good for the teams who now get
to focus their energies elsewhere on something that might work. It beats
spending time on something nobody cares about.

~~~
gbog
Disagree. What is good and often necessary for a start-up is not automatically
necessary for a mammoth like Google. If you take all brain power of Google and
focus it on Google plus, you get overheating, overengineering and other evils.
The mammoth should have expandable parts, forgotten corners, people paid to do
obscure work. They can't be a bunch of guerrilla teams and should do with it.

~~~
jroseattle
I get your sentiment, I find it depends entirely on the context. I don't think
about it from a standpoint of focusing resources on a consolidated number of
projects, but rather moving on to either expansions of those existing efforts
or entirely new ones unto themselves.

A lot of that certainly depends on how they manage those things going forward.
Ideally, these types of steps aren't surprises that come from some unknown
management decision from on high, but a natural course of progression in
project lifecycles.

I prefer the notion of sun-setting services if there is nothing left to learn
from their creation/existence.

------
koyote
Am I the only one who uses iGoogle?

I like having the weather in two different locations, top news stories by
category, and my calendar for the next couple of days all conveniently on a
single webpage.

Is there any viable alternative?

~~~
cmelbye
I just use Dashboard for that. Don't most platforms have desktop widgets?

~~~
freehunter
The article claims people never close their browser (ridiculous, since Chrome
updates every 15-20 minutes). I see my desktop a lot less often than I look at
my homepage. Even when I close my browser, there's often another screen open
behind it.

Besides, the benefit of iGoogle is you can see the same thing on every
computer you visit. Can't do that with desktop widgets.

~~~
rhizome
You just reminded me to check for Netflix popunders.

------
bane
Amazingly I use iGoogle every single day, many times per day. It collects my
news and junk, hosts my frequent bookmarks, etc. Losing it is gonna suck --
hard. I simply don't have a replacement I like as much.

Have they finished moving the video from Google video over to youtube? If not
why not? They've had _years_ to do so.

------
exDM69
Google Code shut down last new year. I have been missing it a lot. It was a
search engine for code repositories and tarballs and had _a lot_ of stuff
indexed. It had a nice Thompson regular expression search and an ability to
filter by metadata like file name or programming language.

Google Code was very useful at giving me examples of how to do a certain
thing. I've used it to search and compare different methods for matrix
inversion, sought for examples on using certain API calls or samples of using
a certain assembly intrinsic function.

GitHub's code search can do some of this but it's not a very good replacement.
Has anyone got suggestions on good search engines for code?

~~~
emmelaich
Perhaps not maintained, but still around:

<http://code.google.com/codesearch>

For other hints, search for older articles on this topic on HN.

~~~
exDM69
Finding this almost made my day, but not quite. It searches only code hosted
at googlecode.com. The discontinued tool searched other hosting sites
(sourceforge, github, etc) as well as tarballs found on the web. The search
tool itself has improved, though.

------
dazbradbury
I hadn't even heard of "google talk chatback"[1]. Isn't this essentially a the
free version of Olark?

I'm simply surprised that Olark is so widespread, and yet I'd never come
across this Google product which is older and extremely similar.

[1] -[http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-talk-
chatback....](http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-talk-
chatback.html)

------
twodayslate
They are discontinuing Google Talk Chatback and the article says to use Meebo,
but most of the Meebo services are being discontinued as well. What is a good
alternative?

~~~
ConstantineXVI
They're referring to the Meebo chatbar, the one Meebo service they aren't
killing off.

~~~
AjithAntony
It appears that the meebo chat requires the visitor to your site to login to
their Google account or meebo account to make it work. This is a very large
obstacle to engagement. The google chatback would let anonymous users chat
with you.

~~~
twodayslate
Exactly. Plus you could just link to a chat - you didn't need an annoying bar
or plugin.

------
billeh
Oh, how I do hope Page Speed is killed in the next batch. Either kill it or
explain how it is calculated and its relevance to SEO.

------
jscheel
This sucks. I, like several of you here, use iGoogle as my homepage. It's been
my homepage since iGoogle came out in 2005. Portals make excellent homepages,
so I'm not sure what Google is getting at here. I just tried Netvibes. It's
ok, but dangit, it's not Google + widgets. I foresee writing a ton of
userscripts to get my experience back.

------
pooriaazimi
Shame... There are some old Charlie Rose interviews on Google Video (about
Kubrick and Apple) that I wanted to download in a few days (tech crunch
doesn't load for me right now so I don't know if Google video is shut down for
good, or is in the process of getting shut down and videos are still up).

~~~
AjithAntony
[http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/07/google-video-
cont...](http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/07/google-video-content-
moving-to-youtube.html)

TUESDAY, JULY 3, 2012 Google Video content moving to YouTube Later this
summer, all remaining hosted video on Google Video will be moved to YouTube.
Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re moving the
remaining hosted content to YouTube as private videos. Google Video users can
rest assured that you won’t be losing any of your content as it will be fully
available on YouTube, and you can choose to make those videos public on
YouTube if you’d like.

If you would prefer to migrate, delete or download your content yourself, you
can do so by visiting the Google Video status page prior to August 20, 2012

------
espeed
Google Video is not the same as YouTube -- it's video search that includes
videos from external websites. Is YouTube going to start indexing external
videos, or is there just going to be a video void for finding this stuff?

~~~
bostonvaulter2
No, the Google Video the article refers to is a google hosting service for
videos that directly competes with youtube. But you haven't been able to
upload new videos to there since 2009. The video search will remain
unaffected.

------
alan_cx
iGoogle is my home page. It shows lots of RSS feeds. Its the first place I see
HN for example. Clearly with that page as my home page I naturally use google
search.

I guess my use of google will up for grabs, I will have to now set my home
page to something else. If that has an integrated search engine, and its not
google, then bye bye google.

I am utterly amazed by this. Google are going to literally tell me not use
them any more. Quite possibly a good thing from my POV. Being so tied in and
then being given a forced out like this is potential gold.

------
ecspike
It's been on life support for years.

Pro tip: If your favorite app hasn't changed anything in years, it's not
because it's perfect. It's because no one is working on it other than keeping
the lights on.﻿

------
______
"The service dates back to a time when homepage portals were people’s entry
points to the Internet."

In many parts of the world, portals are still hugely important... Yahoo is #1
in Japan, for example.

~~~
cbr
Though Yahoo Japan is backed by Google:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/technology/28yahoo.html>

------
Produce
And this is why it's bad practice to rely on third party vendors for things
you actually need. Support OSS and stop this cloud nonsense.

I'm dreaming of a day when everyone owns a server.

------
djrconcepts
I have been using igoogle everyday for years.

I'm upset that google is discontinuing igoogle.

------
nixle
I don't "love" iGoogle, but I have grown into it, all my stuff is there now,
after 5 years.

------
ak0s
I hope they are not going to shutdown Google Reader in favor of G+.

------
jamescun
iGoogle was like the first thing in a long time they did that I actually liked
and used. Today is a sad day, at least for my homepage.

------
at-fates-hands
A bit disappointed about them killing igoogle. I used to use as a great SEO
tactic to increase people's page rank. Even if the site was brand new, you get
put a link on a person's igoogle page and like clockwork within 24-48 hours
they'd be in the SERPS, usually within the first three pages.

I don't do much SEO any more so I'm wondering how effective it really is now.

~~~
yen223
I'm guessing this is the real reason why Google is killing off iGoogle...

~~~
madrona
Love your tinfoil hat, there.

------
samstave
I have 2 primary sites I visit constantly (always have a tab open), with a 3rd
site I visit once a day to maybe once a week: Reddit, HN then Quora.

I have never used iGoogle... and the portal era is past for me.

I prefer google video over youtube though.

I can't stand the fact that on any youtube page the video is such a small
portion of the screen real estate. Google video at least made the damn video
the primary eye catcher.

While im on this little youtube rant - "related" videos and the damn in vid
popups are a farking joke.

If there is one place that google can get disrupted (on the UX) its youtube.

~~~
voltagex_
Have you tried the "feather" UI from the Youtube Labs/beta page?

------
cslarson
they can shutdown iGoogle when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

