iGoogle switched off | Hacker News Reader

iGoogle switched off

google.com

26 pointsbenpink46 comments

The day has come and iGoogle is no more.

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.

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?

Full disclosure I'm the founder of this product (hey its hacker news) but a lot of people have been using 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

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.

This is just about working for me:

http://www.ighome.com/

Google+ has actually turned out to be quite good in terms of a social network that I want to use, and has a lot of tech/programming/science/gadget/photography oriented users.

I haven't really tried to use Google+ in a while, does it seem to have largely ended up as a kind of news subscription service vs. a FB style personal social network?

iGoogle used to be my home page.

Now this is: 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Too bad... it was a great service.

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".

Think "Google" as a verb. "iGoogle" means, "I, Google".[1] (Same logic can be applied to the iPhone)

According to iMac's history on Wikipedia[2], "i" stood for "Internet". (Again, same logic can be applied to the iPhone and iPad. No idea about iPod, which came after iMac but before iPhone and iPad)

[1] This is my personal opinion. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac#History

I always thought it meant 'my'. My Google, My pod..

... Internet Pod? For an offline music player?

the i in apple's products make no sense either

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

It used to when they created the iMac, or 'internet mac', back when the WWW was still novel to most people.

iCEO(Interim CEO a.k.a Steve Jobs) started that "i" series of products. I guess this was the inheritance chain.

interactive?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

Yeah me too. I switched to Netvibes last week and it's just as good for me.

Been using it until yesterday. Loved it.

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.

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

Shame

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....

I would really like to know a good alternative for iGoogle too. My dad has been using it for years as his default homepage and he asks me now and then if I know an alternative because he knew it was ending. He likes it because of the widgets (weather, traffic, notepad, task lists et cetera) and the fact that the Google search is integrated on the same page.

People suggested Symbaloo, but that's only a nice iconic representation of hyperlinks. I don't think there is a site with the same concept as iGoogle. If anyone knows a good altenative then I'd really like to know to make my dad happy again ;)

I somehow understand the move of Google to stop doing iGoogle, because similar widgets are now by default integrated in Windows/Android itself.

I switched over to 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.

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.

Wow it's been at least 6 years I haven't heard about Netvibes. It was a so-called Web 2.0 pioneer. Is it still out there? Let me check my account..

Before iGoogle I used my.yahoo.com. Not really tempted at going back though it does still exist (and apparently never changed, 7 years later).

It actually got an update recently and looks cool. I don't use it though.

http://my.yahoo.com/

Mmmh. Looks better than netvibes. I think I ll give it a shot. Thanks for the tip !

Funny, my profile is still using the old one and it doesn't seem like I can update to the new one. Oh well, I wasn't going to use it anyway I guess.

I mainly used it for reading news and I now use feedly.com for that.

How about a site-specific CSS to set the fontage? If that's your main issue with the site it should be a quick fix.

Or just set your browser to ignore sites' font specifications. Less eye-strain that way in general.

Digg Reader for your RSS feeds, it's a good-looking clone of Google Reader. As for the widgets, you may give a try to My Yahoo since it has been redesigned recently.

igHome is the suggested alternative: http://www.ighome.com/

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