Google Shutdowns Continue: iGoogle, Google Video, Google Mini... | Hacker News Reader

Google Shutdowns Continue: iGoogle, Google Video, Google Mini...

techcrunch.com

125 pointsmjfern81 comments

Why not link to Google's blog instead of TechCrunch?

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-su...

Seriously, screw TechChrunch. They're just this side of blog-spam.

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

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

Just white.

http://imgur.com/J2w2s

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

Please explain.

I have sites that run for years without me editing a single line of code or any other sort of maintainance. Backups run automatically, so do regular clean-ups of the database and certain directories.

What sort of maintainance would you say a largely client-side application like iGoogle does require?

Edit: anybody care to explain the random downvoting?

Are your sites written in C++ and being attacked by China and Russia? Do they have plug-ins for several hundred apps, many of which work with ever changing external websites? Do your sites integrate with critical email and advertising accounts? I would not be surprised to learn they were burning $1M a year on iGoogle.

Re. random downvoting, it happens on tablets. Chill, somebody else will be along shortly to vote the comment up out of the gray.

Attacks: I would guess that is dealt with on a netwok level for all of Google, not individually per app.

Plugins: Just drop the external sources that change their APIs.

Accounts: Accounts are managed by Google Accounts, not by individual apps.

iGoogle is mainly a client-side script that displays small amounts of data. Still think there is not much "maintaining" to do.

It is client side in the www.google.com domain. Meaning it can potentially attack other services in that domain like, oh, most other Google services. You'd want more than just a lone intern watching over it in his spare time.

While that certainly does seem appealing, zombie projects can have serious impact elsewhere in the company. For instance, if a security bug is found in some piece of common infrastructure, you'll have to pull the update and deploy the new code. Seems simple, but in the months or years since the last deploy, many other pieces of infrastructure have changed and now you have to integrate, test and safely deploy a product for which nobody is familiar.

This is not just speculation, either. The project I worked on at Google had to deal with such zombie products all the time, and they were a HUGE drain on productivity for us.

There's also the whole problem where there is no love for maintenance work, and you have to create massive new systems to get anywhere. This biases things towards creation, deployment, and then flying the coop. The zombie projects which follow are inevitable.

The whole thing about "the one which is deprecated and the one which isn't ready yet" is rooted in reality.

You really think it takes 1 person to maintain iGoogle? In a corporate environment with so many users, business rules and systems/infrastructure I'd imagine it is quite a few.

No way. I'd be exceptionally surprised if more than one developer is dedicated to it. All the components inside iGoogle are already supported by their respective teams. News, Calendar, Finance -- in iGoogle these services are accessed by RSS or JSON API's that already exist.

It should theoretically be possible to make iGoogle a 100% client-side one-page app and require zero maintenance, or additional resources.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

For Gmail/Calendar integration, just use widgets on your Android phone :)

I used Element Hiding Helper to remove the header since it's redundant.

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...

They kept messing around with the layouts for it until the very last moment (you can no longer drag and drop widgets into tabs, switching between the tabs takes two clicks instead of one), but I'm in the same boat - any decent replacements?

Netvibes and My Yahoo! both seem to have deteriorated.

ditto.

I don't get their rationale behind killing iGoogle. Sure, it's not sleek looking enough nor "social" enough... but are those enough reasons to kill it? Cost of support? This is a product people actually find useful, and many can't live without, isn't that enough a reason to keep it?!

On the other hand, I wonder how many people would care about it that much if it's Google+ that were dropped... That's actually something you CAN live without...

Actually, it makes sense considering they want Google+ to be the "homepage" of the web. Why compete with your own products?

It makes sense for business, but definitely not for users. Instead of building upon something people actually find useful (iGoogle), they want to replace it with something nobody takes seriously (Google+)?

Have you looked into Netvibes?

My first defection from Yahoo was to iGoogle which and is what I continue to use daily to this day. I've just checked and no product under the Google+ umbrella fills this void.

How they kill this without a suitable replacement available? (the end date is Nov 2013 - so there's still some time).

Over a year ago we created a really simple iGoogle gadget connected to our site that for some reason picked up steam, I really hate to see this go since I know a lot of our users have it.

I personally don't see the point in iGoogle, but it was perfect for a certain demographic. Anecdotally, I know of quite a few middle-aged people who learned to use the internet when portals were king. After Google surpassed Yahoo, they simply switched to iGoogle.

Even with Google Reader, RSS feeds aren't very easy-to-use for non-technical people. It's going to be interesting to see how they adapt now.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Desktop widgets, maybe? Unless you want to access it from multiple devices.

It appears that My Yahoo and NetVibes are still available, although pageflakes seems to have disappeared.

At the official blog post they say

We originally launched iGoogle in 2005 before anyone could fully imagine the ways that today's web and mobile apps would put personalized, real-time information at your fingertips. With modern apps that run on platforms like Chrome and Android, the need for iGoogle has eroded over time, so we’ll be winding it down.

What are these apps? I use Firefox on the desktop and iOS for mobile. Maybe portals are outdated but they still work (especially iGoogle) and the fact that nobody in this thread has pointed out any great alternative is a little disheartening. And leaving tabs open is a horrible UI experience.

They are living in some fantasy land. I know tons of people who use iGoogle and even if overall not that many people are, that doesn't mean it isn't valuable for what it does.

I'd love to see screenshots of how they imagine people now have access at their fingertips to summaries of all this information.

Going to each site individually or keeping things open in 20 tabs is a crap solution.

I would not be surprised if they integrated igoogle services into google plus somehow. perhaps a split newsfeed+widgets service. it would be an effective way to drive a nontrivial amount of traffic to google plus.

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

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.

You just reminded me to check for Netflix popunders.

I've been using Netvibes for almost 6 years now and I'm very happy with it.

At the risk of mentioning "that" company, Bing is not a horrible home page. While I still have iGoogle as my home page on most machines, I have two of them with Win 8 where I've found IE to work better, and the Bing home page is not bad. Combine that with the native gadgets in the Windows desktop, and you're almost there.

Even so, I will miss iGoogle. I presume someone out there has an "iGiggle" domain for a new portal startup waiting in the wings?

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.

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?

Perhaps not maintained, but still around:

http://code.google.com/codesearch

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

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.

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....

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?

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

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.

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

Had totally forgotten about this as well and realized I would love to use it. Aside from Meebo Bar, are there any other services that provide similar functionality? (Namely, allowing you to GChat someone via a widget)

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.

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.

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).

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/07/google-video-cont...

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

This doesn't negate your point, but Yahoo Japan is a different company from Yahoo (which owns about a 30% stake in it).

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.

I have been using igoogle everyday for years.

I'm upset that google is discontinuing igoogle.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Love your tinfoil hat, there.

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.

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

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

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