iGoogle to be buried on November 1st 2013

  • Thread starter Thread starter mrk
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All fine and well but if you use all of Google's services then iGoogle being integrated with them across the top is, as mentioned, why others don't quite come close. And also why I've adopted Google Reader, because of the integration.
 
I tend to prefer not to put all my eggs in one basket but in any case once igoogle goes I'll carry on with net vibes and my.msn.com as a good "quick scan of all my usual web pages" default home page.

As an aside, I wonder if google are killing off igoogle as it kind of bypasses a lot of ads and revenue?
 
It still has ads as you get banners and things in some feeds. I think it has, in part, something to do with security because some of the ad spaces could be exploitable I guess as well as rogue gadgets that people might add.
 
Noticed a little bit of text on the Android Central widget on iGoogle today which linked to iGhome (http://www.ighome.com/) which appears to be a close match to iGoogle and links directly to Google service at the top.

Maybe worth a punt for those who like to keep the clean look and speed/feel of iGoogle.
 
Google have now announced they are shutting down Google Reader on July 1st.

So what now? LifeHacker has a few options.

I'm going with Feedly, Project Normandy should be good as it's a Reader clone and runs on Google's App Engine. The Android app for feedly gives the same Firefox extension experience and it's all synched... Nice.

I've found the current Feedly engine to be good but not perfect, there are a few bugs with slow loading. I imagine once the transition happens and engine/API switches, things will be speedy again.
 
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Honestly what the hell is going on at Google HQ? they start ****ing about with Youtube every other week and make it less and less user friendly and now they're removing iGoogle which I use on a daily basis because everything I need is pretty much right in front of me.

Not at all happy about this. :mad:
 
I moved from Netvibes to iGoogle a few years back and so will probably go back again.

I've also just started using Feedly for iPhone so will use this in tandem with Netvibes.

Why are Google killing off all of these great services? It will be Gmail next. :p
 
I doubt GMail will ever go down! I hope not anyway...

Google revolve around stats, given the recent announcement of Reader and also the other services being shutdown it seems these were only used by a small number of Google users, people like us really and to Google we don't matter that much compared to the millions of other people who use stuff like GMail every other second :p
 
There's one thing I really like about Netvibes, that it greys out articles you click on to read so you can quickly skim to new content on modules spanning several items.

The thing I don't like though is that the Google Search bar at the top doesn't support Google Instant! And that there isn't a mobile version of the netvibes homepage so a feed reader is still required. gReader has a really nice and smooth interface that can be operated by one hand and uses gestures. I'm hoping that the reader app for Android continues to work since the feeds part is just a URL anyway and content is fetched from the source and not the Google Reader service.

With Netvibes and greader I could continue to have a content rich experience until Feedly is updated or just stick with this as it works quite well...
 
Can't believe Google Reader is gone. It was my most used service by far, several times a day.

If you weren't using Reader frankly you weren't using the internet properly. It let you keep track of the latest things on hundreds of sites every day without having to manually visit them all.

Really going to miss it, I hope Feedly's new back end will live up to replacing it.
 
This just popped up at the top of my Netvibes page:

If you're experiencing slowdowns or feed latency, please bear with us as we work hard to handle a huge amount of new users. Thank you for your patience
Click to expand...

Just goes to show how many people used iGoogle/Reader I guess, even if the numbers are small for a Google userbase, it's going to be huge for all other providers.
 
Many of the RSS app developers for Android / iOS will likely try and keep them alive I guess, it all depends on them finding a decent source. Reeder uses Fever already but not everyone has their own serve to run it on.
 
I don't get it. It doesn't cost anything for google to leave it there. It's just pure engineering exercise. "You will read what and how we want you to read it".

It's kind of like with text newsgroups. When google bought deja news, "Discussions" link was third option in search. Web search, Image search, Search in discussions. They then moved it to the end of the options, then outside of the options, into "more" tab. Now it's completely gone from links. And of course only old timers are using NNTP, since it's no longer accessible in organised way. They just didn't like the idea of unmoderated discussions staying in public view forever.
 
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