News Google closes more features in 'spring' clean sweep

I'm going to be really gutted when iGoogle finally goes. It has been my homepage for years now, and I have no idea what I'm going to use to replace it.

 

iGoogle
Wave

both fantastic projects, superb idea and well executed, sad to see them go.

are you going to try out Google+. nope, that would also be gone in a few years time, so might as well not bother signing up at all! love your Android? things get moved around on every release. Love simplified Google page? nope, shove a dark bar on top.

 

I love you iGoogle.. please dont leave me

 

iGoogle is great, I know google's suggestion was to use their reader but just not the same

 

Never used igoogle. Can't see this affecting me much, or at all.

 

Long Live Igoogle was a nice thing

 

Wait, did they say they're killing Google Labs? So, they're killing off the section that spawned a lot of what makes Google useful? Well, GMail, at least. Seems like pretty well everything they've killed/are killing came from Labs in the first place.

Screw not being able to use a custom image on their homepage - the only reason I sign into Google is to check email, and I sign out as soon as I'm done. I couldn't tell you the last time I was on google.com, and that was likely only to check out some Easter egg. Thanks to integrated search from the browser, I have no need to visit the site.

I wonder if this is some "time to grow up and be a real company" pressure from shareholders.

 

This reminded me...

"You blocked me in Google+
And now you're going to die"

Just isn't the same :/

 

i am a bit miffed about iGoogle I must admit. Can't understand why they would get rid of it....

 

iGoogle being my landing page also means that 99% of my searches are done through Google, because its just there, its a simple, elegant solution to create a great personalised web experience and as of yet I've not seen anything that competes well at all, which seems nuts to me. If Bing or Yahoo were to offer a comparable service I'd start using it in no time at all, and they'd start generating Ad revenue from me and thousands of users like me. It blows my mind that Google doesn't get this, and more so that the competition doesn't capitalise on this opportunity, its a very "light" service to offer in terms of load and resources and drives people to use your portal as a default.

As for Picasa, I've been paying Google for Storage on Picasa for ages, and had to leave Google+ because they bundled it in with it meaning anyone I'd shared photos with on Google+ could then reshare the whole album with anyone they wanted, why would they offer that feature it seems crazy and took me out of their social network (the only social network I used for a while).

I'm sure they know what they're doing as a company but they seem to be actively trying to drive my traffic to the competition.

 

Not enough users. Simple as that.

 

Define "enough" the costs to Google of running the service even with no maintenance would be an absolute pittance with their existing cloud infrastructure. Not even worth noting really, and it likely pays for itself with the fact that if you're an iGoogle user you likely use multiple devices all with an iGoogle homepage and drives all search traffic through Google plus provides interesting metrics on user data. They mentioned somewhere in the region of 200,000 users I believe (seem to remember reading it on a Google Blog about the time they announced the shutdown a few months back).

Thats with no updates in years and no active encouragement for people to use it. In my office alone 3-4 people have iGoogle home pages on their laptops/iPads and desktops.

If someone else was to offer an comparable service it wouldn't be a problem, we'd be over there like a shot and I'm sure MS wouldn't mind another 200,000 users driving all their traffic through Bing. It irritates me nobody seems to be offering a decent alternative.

 

It's not up to me define "enough". Google kills projects which don't have high enough user base. If you disagree with them, it's unfortunate for you, but it's what they did many times before - it's just now that they hit a project you used.

 

Very true, it just seems an odd business practice honestly to annoy what are substantial numbers of customers who are driving revenue through your business and are likely to be heavy users.

That said, I think I've just found a new alternative I'm going to have to try.

Its called igHome and it even advertises as an iGoogle alternative. : http://www.ighome.com/

 

Still using iGoogle for all my RSSing, gonna miss that.