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Google Killing Off Mini, Video, and iGoogle
New submitter Trashcan Romeo writes "Three years ago, it accounted for 20% of all visits to Google's home page. Two years ago, Lifehacker readers voted it the best start-page service. Today it was announced that iGoogle will be retired — or in the company's parlance, 'spring cleaned' — on November 1, 2013."
Google Video is also getting the axe this summer. It hasn't accepted new videos since 2009, and all of the old ones will be migrated to YouTube. The company is also getting rid of Google Mini, Talk Chatback, and their Symbian search app.
Reading over the sunset annoucement, I don't think they realize how people really use it. It's not a mobile service, and it isn't simply a redundant link to stuff, it's a dashboard of what I'm interested in and a portal to all of Google's other services. It's also not just a homepage, it's the page I have open on my desktop all the time.
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
I've used my iGoogle page as my homepage for however long it's been around - five years? six? It'll suck having this go away, but it's been obvious for a while that Google's all about killing off anything they offer that they've been unable to monetize.
What I find funny is their suggestion that, as an "alternative" to iGoogle, we should either move to using Google Play (um, what?) or start using Chrome as a browser. Yeah, how are those iGoogle replacements again?
I'll find a non-Google replacement, just like I have whenever they've discontinued their other offerings I liked.
#DeleteChrome
Cloud computing is always heavily promoted and it does have many advantages. However, it also has one significant disadvantage -- your computing environment is at the whim of whomever is providing said service. If you come to depend on a service and the provider cancels it, you can try and find a substitute or simply accept that you are out of luck.
These services that Google is dropping, are not critical, but they could have been. Not every cloud has a silver lining, or even a chrome one.
A tool built almost entirely in javascript doesn't work with a JAVASCRIPT BLOCKER?!?!?!?!?11111111
That's just crazy talk.
But seriously, expecting to browse the modern web with noscript enabled just isn't sane.
I've been using iGoogle since it first launched and it's really the only reason I use many of Googles services and also the only reason I bother logging into Google at all.
Very disappointed in honesty I think I'll probably end up giving Bing a try simply because I can't think of anything else to replace it with.
Hrm. I've been using iGoogle as a homepage for years, now... nice convenient place to simultaneously check email and news before doing whatever else I'm doing with my browser at the moment. Heck, I mainly check /. based on the iGoogle widget; it's a convenient way to promote things to my attention. In contrast, I rather dislike the Reader interface; if iGoogle is indeed axed, I probably won't start using Reader afterwards (or at all, probably)... they do different things in different ways, and Google really doesn't have a good replacement on hand.
I've used iGoogle for years because I spend most of my day in a corporate environment. It put everything I needed on 1 page... Google... which I was almost expected to visit regularly. So I'd pop it up, I could see my email, the temperature, CNN news, and even slashdot. In fact, I read this story first through iGoogle. Can I use Chrome and its extensions to do this like they suggest? No... my web client is fixed, and I can't add extensions at work. The idea that we're moving away from web based apps to browser based, local plugins it insane to me. What is this? 1999?
I can't imagine a web with no Javascript. It's like using half of the web. I'm a webdeveloper and website owner and I really, really, really don't care about people who don't have Javascript enabled. I'd rather give the rest a great experience and I don't want to spend time and resources to provide a fallback.
Also advertising supports many of my favorite sites. I probably wouldn't be paying for a subscription, but I think it's common courtesy to give website owners the chance to make a buck for their hard work. I have Adblock installed and I only use it when ads are too annoying that they disturb my browsing experience.