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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I utterly fail to see why shutting this down was a good idea.<p>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.<p>Outside of My Yahoo (which was recently updated thank goodness), any other alternatives?
iGoogle used to be my home page.<p>Now this is: <a href="http://www.ighome.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ighome.com/</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>Um....so... yeah, well done google. I assume Im not worth enough to them. Hell, turns out, google isnt worth much to me either.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 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".
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.