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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.
Really. I pinged a friend who uses iGoogle, and he's just like "Meh".
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
I've been using iGoogle since '05, I feel like this is a loss but I'm already moving over to Google Reader and getting used to the new interface... at first I'm "Meh" about Reader, but I dont hate it, yet.
All videos on Google Video will become private YouTube videos. Will this see the return of the Google Video archiving effort by Archive Team, covered in a previous Slashdot story?
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
I'd keep that.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's a damned good non-YouTube search engine.
I read the featured articles, and it appears Google is not retiring Google Video Search. It's retiring Google Video hosting so that it can focus effort on Google Video Search: "As we said nearly three years ago, the Google Video team is now focused on tackling the challenge of video search."
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.
iDon't know, maybe Google's simply replaced the i with a +?
Reader is totally lame. When I heard this news, I thought to myself, 'well, time to take another look at Reader, maybe they made it not lame in time to retire iGoogle....' Nope. Nothing but a mash of items with some useless numbers next to them about how many things you haven't read. Most of the screen real estate is completely wasted and there's no setting to improve it.
The whole reason that iGoogle's RSS widgets were so awesome is that you could pile tons of them on top of each other four columns deep. I could see, in an organized way, like two hundred headlines at once and not have to click on anything except what I cared about. Reader is too manual. I don't want to click on a dozen different things just to get huge bloated summaries of things I might not even want to read. It's inefficient, and I'm just not doing it. Bye Google, you sure know how to break people of a habit.
Guess I'll look into this netvibes thing everybody is talking about.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Google started killing off the mini years ago when they stopped releasing software updates for it, and stopped updating the hardware.
It's kind of disingenuous for Google to say the mini has an 'adequate' replacement. Google Custom Search doesn't give the admin nearly enough control. There's no way to guarantee all your pages will get included in the index, even if you're on a paid subscription. No keymatch functionality, no regex exclusions, no freshness tuning. And the Google Search Appliance costs over 10x the cost of the mini (starts at $45k instead of $3k). It's hard to call that a suitable replacement.
The problem with the mini is that Google couldn't make enough money on it. It basically started out as a min-GSA, with less beefy hardware and a lower license page limit. Customers would buy it, deploy it, and forget about it. It worked great. Google thought that customers would migrate from the mini to the GSA, but I think what happened is once they had the mini they stayed with the mini for their public website, and many never saw the need to spend $$$$$ to upgrade to the GSA for enterprise search.
At one point a few years ago, Google released a "VM edition" of the mini/gsa for development use. They quickly realized that VM was the wrong way to go because without the pretty hardware and cables they couldn't justify the cost of the GSA to customers, so they quietly cancelled the VM and all mention of it. Wish I had kept the copy I had downloaded.
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.
I use iGoogle. I will miss it. I hope they will have something to replace it. IMHO, Google services always have the feel of something half finished. They are kinda like the anti Apple.
How about MyYahoo? iGoogle was a knockoff of 90's "personalized web portals" anyway, so why not go with the original?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I use iGoogle as my landing page. I have my email, slashdot, new york times, BBC, the weather, a sunlight map, wikipedia, and a pet hamster all on the same page. Where else am I going to get all that the second I open firefox?
My kingdom for a donkey!
iGoogle. Having all of your RSS feeds, your email feed, calendar, TODO list among a few other things. It is very useful and effective in what it does.
There are several websites that post interesting items, but not enough to visit them every day. The RSS feed makes it were you don't have too. Combining it all with stuff you do use every day (email, calendar, todo list) makes iGoogle extremely useful.
What I find is most people have tools at their finger tips that they have no idea how useful that tool actually is and therefore don't end up using it.
iGoogle is useful, but like Google+ most people have no idea how to actually use it. (at least half-intelligent people are actually figuring out how to use Google+, that just doesn't seem to be the case for iGoogle)
That ignorance is a loss for us all.
I've been using iGoogle as my home page forever. Considering the broad range of services Google provides now - email, chat, voice services, etc. - you'd think they'd want to provide a central hub. I've got mine set up for some basic news headlines with sports, hollywood, and Fox filtered out. I also use it for local weather, Google Chat, and to manage account settings. I think I'll miss the news aggregator function the most.
Any suggestions for a good generalized news aggregator? Something that will draw from a variety of sources and can be customized for topic preferences.
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?
That's it! Lets fork this shit!
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
If you have access to a web server, there are a number of ways to set something similar up yourself. I've done it at seandiggity.com using WordPress + Aggregator theme + some extra plugins. There are definitely simpler ways, but I like the flexibility of WordPress's widgets.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
As a matter of fact, the tech site forums are loaded with people bemoaning the demise of iGoogle.
One of the things that Google is really good at is analytics. They KNOW how many people are using iGoogle.
That leads me to believe they are shuttering it not because of lack of use but rather because TOO many people are using it. They obviously believe they are losing "clicks" or as some others have stated, they are trying to herd us into using some bastardized version of Google+ they have yet to release.
Google has been pretty good about living up to the whole, "Do no evil" thing so I'm hoping we all wake up in a few days/week and read on our shiny new netvibes.com homepage that Google has changed their mind about dropping iGoogle.
Dropping iGoogle might not be totally "evil" but it will definitely make me think twice before using any other new Google-branded services they release in the future.
You seem really withdrawn and distant. It's that gossipy jerk Facebook, isn't it?
Our iGoogle times were great. Remember how we discovered new things with Reader, how we built our lives around Calendar? And wow, you were really good in search!
But you've changed, Google. I don't mind that you're heavier, but this diet is like cutting off your legs to lose weight. And frankly, you're kind of clingy.
So let's just be friends. I'll still see ya around Maps, and maybe we can catch an image search sometime. Your tracking will always be with me.
Sorry I missed you at Plus, I came by but no one was there.
This expectation is easily proven by the many businesses that still keep IE6 around because of a business critical web site that requires it.
Agreed; it seems odd to me that they'd kill something that (at least to my eyes) doesn't look like it requires any maintenanace, and is really quite a good tool. Maybe they have something up their sleeves, but I'd have appreciated if they did that they'd release it before killing something like this...
They DO have something up their sleeves, and it's called Chrome. They want everybody using Chrome, that's the point.
And exactly what does Chrome have to do with replacing iGoogle? Chrome is a browser. iGoogle is a customized homepage. I use Chrome [love it]. I use iGoogle.I have my iGoogle home page set up exactly how I like it. I have my most frequently visited bookmarks set up, I have the site feeds I want, the weather I want, the various other widgets I want, and they're all in the same place they've been for the last half-decade so I know exactly where to click for what I want.
I will not be happy if they retire iGoogle.
Nothing to see here
iGoogle has been my home page for years as well. I check my email, news, sports, slashdot, woot, weather, traffic, movie times, network tools, etc. all in one interface. I'm going to be very sad to see it go. Those that never used it missed out on a good app that could be used to consolidate a bunch of information in one place.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be a good replacement?
So I can replace iGoogle with netvibes, we've established that. I'd now like to know how to let google know how displeased I am about their decision to cancel iGoogle. Does anyone have a link I can use to rant at google? I looked around google's help pages for a little while, with no success :-(
You miss the point. Yes, these are relatively trivial services, but that doesn't mean that cloud providers can'tor won't drop more important services. You maynot expect an online service to last more than 5 years, but most businesses do.
But you miss the point. If it is important to you that a service be there, you should be willing to pay for it (or support it in other ways). If you're willing to pay, you're going to find someone willing to take your money and provide the service. It might not be the original provider of the service, but nobody ever promised you that. What's more, you've got plenty of notice of the discontinuation of the service by the current provider, time enough to find a replacement. (If you have irreplaceable data in the service — shame on you if you do! — then it is a very good day to start backing that data up to something you control directly. But that was true a day ago, a week ago, a month ago, and a year ago too.)
Expecting a service to "just be there" while costing nothing to you is unreasonable. It's even unreasonable on the internet (shock! horror!) and the Cloud is just a label for virtualized services provided over the internet.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I have found iGoogle very useful. Having one tab where I can quickly check email, calendar, weather, docs, to do list etc.and then launch from there only if needed has been very efficient. It means I don't have to use notifications so can ignore stuff when until I quickly want to check then see everything with one click. It is the same on my desktop, laptop and all the different Windows, MacOs and Linux computers in different browsers at work with no hassles or involvement from IT. And it is launched when ever you start the browser or click on the home page icon.
The thing is that not enough people used it for Google to be bothered supporting it and the current trend is to stand alone apps because there is no point in doing anything else on phones and tablets. Sure I can stick a lot of different applications in shortcuts on desktops or run apps in multiple tabs but it will be much less inconvenient. Having everything automatically open in one tab with a sensible layout was the whole point.
Interestingly I tried changing my homepage from iGoogle to Google Search to see what life will be like without iGoogle, but when you try to automatically open search as your homepage it still defaults to iGoogle, part of Google's attempts to promote the service.
one really good thing about igoogle was that I never saw it censored by sysadmins. what I've found is you have to use the services that they use but don't tell you about and this was one of them.
personally I won't miss google video but talkback is a shame and isn't mini a major shock for websites that use it?
A blog I run for the wealth
It's things like this that make me - and possibly small businesses - nervous about email and the other google apps products
While it's unlikely they'd ever kill gmail, it makes it harder to make a case to bet the farm on google. Shame there's no really viable alternative to email with a half decent web interface (animated ads flickering in the corner of my eye annoy the hell out of me and I don't want to jump through ad-blocking hoops on every PC I ever use).
So iGoogle might not be a big product, but it's visible enough (unlike maybe some of the smaller products they've killed) to make potential users pause.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Just wondering if getting rid of iGoogle, which I was never a fan of but which didn't seem heinous either, has anything to do with the "Google Now" app on Android.
They don't clarify what "modern apps" we are supposed to switch to other than pointing at the Chrome store, or even what exactly a "modern app" is. Some would say a "modern app" could mean something like GMail or iGoogle
Well a "modern app" on chrome is sure as hell not google reader.
on igoog, the goog reader widget shows you all your new feeds and refreshes pretty much real time. You can look at comments and decide to open if its good enough (like this /. story) or close and it disappears (like, say, another dancing cats /. video story). Awesome functionality. Its hard to think of how to improve it.
on chrome, there are two goog reader "apps". Its moronic to call an icon-bookmark a app, but they have the balls to do it, so if you're too dumb to set or use a bookmark for reader.google.com but able to fog a mirror occasionally enough to install a chrome app, you can get a icon on your page that when clicked goes to reader.goog, and sadly thats all it does, nothing more than a bookmark. LAME! The other "app" is a toolbar icon that shows a digital count of how many new stories/articles/feed items whatever are waiting and usually operates on a couple minute latency from the igoog display, which is kinda weird but you get used to it. Its only other functionality is to, you guessed it, act as a "bookmark-icon" for reader.goog again... Thats all it does. LAME!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Netvibes is blocked by my employer's firewall ;-(
As much as I hate to say this, My.MSN.com seems to have basically a clone of iGoogle. Anybody wondering about it, should go look at it and try the "Customize" and "Add Content" features. I found everything I use on iGoogle there.
I don't use an MSN email box, but could add Gmail as a bookmark easily enough, that's how I use it in iGoogle now anyway.
Plus, switching from Google to Microsoft over this will be an appropriate "FUCK YOU RIGHT BACK COCKSUCKER" to the folks over at Google for fucking with something that's actually useful.