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Comment by koyote | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 Maybe portals are outdated but they still work (especially iGoogle) and the fact that nobody in this thread has pointed out any great alternative is a little disheartening.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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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