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

Why not link to Google's blog instead of TechCrunch?<p><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-summer.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-su...</a>

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.

Interesting that they are killing off iGoogle. One might hope there would be a Gplus theme for that home page that would duplicate it.<p>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?<p>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.

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.<p>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.

Am I the only one who uses iGoogle?<p>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.<p>Is there any viable alternative?

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.<p>Have they finished moving the video from Google video over to youtube? If not why not? They've had <i>years</i> 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 <i>a lot</i> of stuff indexed. It had a nice Thompson regular expression search and an ability to filter by metadata like file name or programming language.<p>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.<p>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?

I hadn't even heard of "google talk chatback"[1]. Isn't this essentially a the free version of Olark?<p>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.<p>[1] -<a href="http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-talk-chatback.html" rel="nofollow">http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-talk-chatback....</a>

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?

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).

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?

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

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

I have been using igoogle everyday for years.<p>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.<p>I don't do much SEO any more so I'm wondering how effective it really is now.

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.<p>I have never used iGoogle... and the portal era is past for me.<p>I prefer google video over youtube though.<p>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.<p>While im on this little youtube rant - "related" videos and the damn in vid popups are a farking joke.<p>If there is one place that google can get disrupted (on the UX) its youtube.

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