Since July we have known that Google would but shutting down its personalized homepage service, iGoogle. That time has finally come with iGoogle officially being shutdown after being around for eight years.
iGoogle was a relatively popular service but development for it seemed to slow down as time went on and once 2013 came, Google no longer had much interest in keeping iGoogle around.
Whether or not the name of the service had any impact on its shutdown was not mentioned, but considering that iGoogle looks more like an Apple service than a Google one, it may have helped to kill it off. Google has been shutting down a large portion of its online products for nearly two years now and has decided to consolidate its services.
As Google was announcing its plan to shutdown iGoogle on November 1, the company’s general manager Matt Eichner stated:
We originally launched iGoogle in 2005 before anyone could fully imagine the ways that today’s web and mobile apps would put personalized, real-time information at your fingertips. With modern apps that run on platforms like Chrome and Android, the need for iGoogle has eroded over time, so we’ll be winding it down,
It’s definitely true that services such as iGoogle simply are not very popular anymore, and most people have no interest in personalizing their computer’s homepage. However, iGoogle would have been shutdown even if it was still popular, as we saw with Google Reader, which was taken down despite an enormous amount of users.
With Google+ becoming more prevalent and Google attempting to connect all of its services through the use of user profiles, iGoogle simply did not fit into the company’s product scheme anymore. While the search giant may have less products overall, it has been able to step up development on the products that truly matter, Google+ , YouTube, Gmail, and of course, Android.
I want my iGoogle back
— Rob England (@theitskeptic) November 3, 2013
As expected, there are some users that adamantly want iGoogle to come back. If you happen to be one of those people, or you simply like the idea of having a personalized homepage, there are some good alternatives available.
Yahoo still offers a pretty good homepage service, My Yahoo, but there are others to choose from including MyFav.es, StartMe, and Hinto. All of these services work in a very similar way to iGoogle and tend to operate based around different widgets for weather, news, mail, etc.
