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Google Shutdowns Continue: iGoogle, Google Video, Google Mini...
- twodayslate 14y agoThey are discontinuing Google Talk Chatback and the article says to use Meebo, but most of the Meebo services are being discontinued as well. What is a good alternative?
- ConstantineXVI 14y agoThey're referring to the Meebo chatbar, the one Meebo service they aren't killing off.
- AjithAntony 14y agoIt appears that the meebo chat requires the visitor to your site to login to their Google account or meebo account to make it work. This is a very large obstacle to engagement. The google chatback would let anonymous users chat with you.
- twodayslate 14y agoExactly. Plus you could just link to a chat - you didn't need an annoying bar or plugin.
- ricefield 14y agoHad totally forgotten about this as well and realized I would love to use it. Aside from Meebo Bar, are there any other services that provide similar functionality? (Namely, allowing you to GChat someone via a widget)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- koyote 14y agoAm I the only one who uses iGoogle? I like having the weather in two different locations, top news stories by category, and my calendar for the next couple of days all conveniently on a single webpage. Is there any viable alternative?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoDesktop widgets, maybe? Unless you want to access it from multiple devices.
- bryanlarsen 14y agoIt appears that My Yahoo and NetVibes are still available, although pageflakes seems to have disappeared.
- shmageggy 14y agoAt the official blog post they say 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. What are these apps? I use Firefox on the desktop and iOS for mobile. Maybe portals are outdated but they still work (especially iGoogle) and the fact that nobody in this thread has pointed out any great alternative is a little disheartening. And leaving tabs open is a horrible UI experience.
- eagsalazar 14y agoThey are living in some fantasy land. I know tons of people who use iGoogle and even if overall not that many people are, that doesn't mean it isn't valuable for what it does. I'd love to see screenshots of how they imagine people now have access at their fingertips to summaries of all this information. Going to each site individually or keeping things open in 20 tabs is a crap solution.
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- ChuckMcM 14y agoInteresting that they are killing off iGoogle. One might hope there would be a Gplus theme for that home page that would duplicate it. In the mean time it seems like a really really easy way to get about 10M uniques a month. I wonder if you implement an iGoogle clone on AE/CE and fund it with AdSense ads would they ban you? I love the synergy of keeping a Google product alive on Google infrastructure but redirecting the money to someone willing to maintain it. Could be an interesting test case.
- beambot 14y agoiGoogle has been my homepage for some time and is my window into numerous google properties (gmail, calendar, etc). This is an unwelcome change.
- Torrents 14y agoI've used it for years as well. I have Gmail and Google Calendar widgets, one for Hacker News, one for Reddit, and other news sites. It's a useful aggregator for all of the resources I use on the Web. I'll have to find a replacement before November of 2013.
- fishbacon 14y agoI never found iGoogle too appealing because I find the interface messy, any idea what draws you to it? Is it just that it contains a bunch of RSS data?
- freehunter 14y agoPersonally I use iGoogle daily simply because of the Gmail/Calendar integration (don't need to open anything else to see those) right on the first page I see when I open my browser. It allows me to start my day at one glance: new emails, daily events, and RSS feeds of overnight news. When I switched to it, I was previously using Netvibes. I switched because it loaded roughly 5x faster than Netvibes. There are some things I don't like about it. The header is gigantic. I wish I could turn that off and add a few more feeds without needing to scroll. iGoogle has also been breaking a lot lately. I actually removed my Gmail feed simply because it never worked even though it was developed by Google themselves. I'm sad to see it go, but it's better than the sorry state it's been in for the last few years.
- martythemaniak 14y agoOne way to look at all these shutdowns is that Google is on a hiring spree - for every one of these zombie projects they kill they get a bunch of engineers who are already vetted by Google's HR and are familiar with Google's dev processes.
- eagsalazar 14y agoHow many people are honestly required to maintain iGoogle? Full time? One? Two if they browse the internet most of the day. Just leave it up for christs sake. I wonder if this isn't about forcing people to other services. Take the developers and let it keep going. No new commits, it works!
- zitterbewegung 14y agoYou are ignoring the cost of maintaining software. That is huge. "Working" is a relative term.
- eagsalazar 14y agoI'm not ignoring it at all. I'm just calling bullshit on the idea that the cost is anywhere near "huge". 1 developer, 75% time. That's it. If they are north of 2 developers they are doing something very wrong.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 14y agoEven granting your premise, who wants to be the ONE developer stuck working on some project that clearly has no future?
- praxulus 14y agoIndeed, 1 google developer is going to be north of $100K/year, and if you're going to trust them to run a project, even a zombie one, probably significantly higher. Even worse is the loss of their expert advice and productivity on projects that actually deserve it.
- ______ 14y ago"The service dates back to a time when homepage portals were people’s entry points to the Internet." In many parts of the world, portals are still hugely important... Yahoo is #1 in Japan, for example.
- samstave 14y agoI have 2 primary sites I visit constantly (always have a tab open), with a 3rd site I visit once a day to maybe once a week: Reddit, HN then Quora. I have never used iGoogle... and the portal era is past for me. I prefer google video over youtube though. I can't stand the fact that on any youtube page the video is such a small portion of the screen real estate. Google video at least made the damn video the primary eye catcher. While im on this little youtube rant - "related" videos and the damn in vid popups are a farking joke. If there is one place that google can get disrupted (on the UX) its youtube.
- voltagex_ 14y agoHave you tried the "feather" UI from the Youtube Labs/beta page?
- MattLaroche 14y agoWhy not link to Google's blog instead of TechCrunch? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-summer.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-su...
- phene 14y agoSeriously, screw TechChrunch. They're just this side of blog-spam.
- eagsalazar 14y agoTechcrunch and readership are complete douchebag hipster wannabe idiots. Reading the tc comments on this article made me want to spit.
- Dylan16807 14y agoIn general I agree, but when in the specific case of blogspot I dislike seeing a blank white page when javascript is off.
- GoodIntentions 14y agoNot even a "yo, dude this site needs javascript to work" message. Graceful degra-what?
- josteink 14y agoJust white. http://imgur.com/J2w2s http://imgur.com/J2w2s
- Jebus 14y agoI'm glad I decided to move away from all google products a few months ago. By now I'm almost done, and I already feel like my privacy is healing.
- espeed 14y agoGoogle Video is not the same as YouTube -- it's video search that includes videos from external websites. Is YouTube going to start indexing external videos, or is there just going to be a video void for finding this stuff?
- bostonvaulter2 14y agoNo, the Google Video the article refers to is a google hosting service for videos that directly competes with youtube. But you haven't been able to upload new videos to there since 2009. The video search will remain unaffected.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- pooriaazimi 14y agoShame... There are some old Charlie Rose interviews on Google Video (about Kubrick and Apple) that I wanted to download in a few days (tech crunch doesn't load for me right now so I don't know if Google video is shut down for good, or is in the process of getting shut down and videos are still up).
- AjithAntony 14y agohttp://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/07/google-video-content-moving-to-youtube.html http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/07/google-video-cont... TUESDAY, JULY 3, 2012 Google Video content moving to YouTube Later this summer, all remaining hosted video on Google Video will be moved to YouTube. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re moving the remaining hosted content to YouTube as private videos. Google Video users can rest assured that you won’t be losing any of your content as it will be fully available on YouTube, and you can choose to make those videos public on YouTube if you’d like. If you would prefer to migrate, delete or download your content yourself, you can do so by visiting the Google Video status page prior to August 20, 2012
- bane 14y agoAmazingly I use iGoogle every single day, many times per day. It collects my news and junk, hosts my frequent bookmarks, etc. Losing it is gonna suck -- hard. I simply don't have a replacement I like as much. Have they finished moving the video from Google video over to youtube? If not why not? They've had years to do so.
- at-fates-hands 14y agoA bit disappointed about them killing igoogle. I used to use as a great SEO tactic to increase people's page rank. Even if the site was brand new, you get put a link on a person's igoogle page and like clockwork within 24-48 hours they'd be in the SERPS, usually within the first three pages. I don't do much SEO any more so I'm wondering how effective it really is now.
- dazbradbury 14y agoI hadn't even heard of "google talk chatback"[1]. Isn't this essentially a the free version of Olark? I'm simply surprised that Olark is so widespread, and yet I'd never come across this Google product which is older and extremely similar. [1] -http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-talk-chatback.html http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/google-talk-chatback....
- jroseattle 14y agoI find these types of actions as very important to the culture of the company. It says we keep our house clean, we don't leave old things we tried lying around, and we acknowledge that some things work and some don't. It may be negligible in terms of workforce impact, but it sends a signal that I think is very refreshing. Good for Larry, and good for the teams who now get to focus their energies elsewhere on something that might work. It beats spending time on something nobody cares about.
- gbog 14y agoDisagree. What is good and often necessary for a start-up is not automatically necessary for a mammoth like Google. If you take all brain power of Google and focus it on Google plus, you get overheating, overengineering and other evils. The mammoth should have expandable parts, forgotten corners, people paid to do obscure work. They can't be a bunch of guerrilla teams and should do with it.
- jroseattle 14y agoI get your sentiment, I find it depends entirely on the context. I don't think about it from a standpoint of focusing resources on a consolidated number of projects, but rather moving on to either expansions of those existing efforts or entirely new ones unto themselves. A lot of that certainly depends on how they manage those things going forward. Ideally, these types of steps aren't surprises that come from some unknown management decision from on high, but a natural course of progression in project lifecycles. I prefer the notion of sun-setting services if there is nothing left to learn from their creation/existence.
- billeh 14y agoOh, how I do hope Page Speed is killed in the next batch. Either kill it or explain how it is calculated and its relevance to SEO.
- jamescun 14y agoiGoogle was like the first thing in a long time they did that I actually liked and used. Today is a sad day, at least for my homepage.
- ak0s 14y agoI hope they are not going to shutdown Google Reader in favor of G+.
- alan_cx 14y agoiGoogle is my home page. It shows lots of RSS feeds. Its the first place I see HN for example. Clearly with that page as my home page I naturally use google search. I guess my use of google will up for grabs, I will have to now set my home page to something else. If that has an integrated search engine, and its not google, then bye bye google. I am utterly amazed by this. Google are going to literally tell me not use them any more. Quite possibly a good thing from my POV. Being so tied in and then being given a forced out like this is potential gold.
- Produce 14y agoAnd this is why it's bad practice to rely on third party vendors for things you actually need. Support OSS and stop this cloud nonsense. I'm dreaming of a day when everyone owns a server.
- exDM69 14y agoGoogle Code shut down last new year. I have been missing it a lot. It was a search engine for code repositories and tarballs and had a lot of stuff indexed. It had a nice Thompson regular expression search and an ability to filter by metadata like file name or programming language. Google Code was very useful at giving me examples of how to do a certain thing. I've used it to search and compare different methods for matrix inversion, sought for examples on using certain API calls or samples of using a certain assembly intrinsic function. GitHub's code search can do some of this but it's not a very good replacement. Has anyone got suggestions on good search engines for code?
- emmelaich 14y agoPerhaps not maintained, but still around: http://code.google.com/codesearch http://code.google.com/codesearch For other hints, search for older articles on this topic on HN.
- exDM69 14y agoFinding this almost made my day, but not quite. It searches only code hosted at googlecode.com. The discontinued tool searched other hosting sites (sourceforge, github, etc) as well as tarballs found on the web. The search tool itself has improved, though.
- nixle 14y agoI don't "love" iGoogle, but I have grown into it, all my stuff is there now, after 5 years.
- jscheel 14y agoThis sucks. I, like several of you here, use iGoogle as my homepage. It's been my homepage since iGoogle came out in 2005. Portals make excellent homepages, so I'm not sure what Google is getting at here. I just tried Netvibes. It's ok, but dangit, it's not Google + widgets. I foresee writing a ton of userscripts to get my experience back.
- cslarson 14y agothey can shutdown iGoogle when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
- ecspike 14y agoIt's been on life support for years. Pro tip: If your favorite app hasn't changed anything in years, it's not because it's perfect. It's because no one is working on it other than keeping the lights on.
- djrconcepts 14y agoI have been using igoogle everyday for years. I'm upset that google is discontinuing igoogle.