Google is amazing. Don’t get me wrong. They have the best collection of cloud-based services of anyone. I write about them on this blog A LOT. I’m a fan!
However, I was surprised to see that they have started announcing the end of their iGoogle dashboard. If you are NOT using iGoogle, you should be.. or should have been.. Don’t get used to the amazing productivity it provides now because I’ve found nothing like it on the web.
Their reasoning (unreasoning) is here:
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2664197
What they propose as a reason makes no sense given how iGoogle is used. On my Toolbox blog I suggest it is like the producers of peanut butter ending production because there are such things as tennis balls.
Yeah.. that’s sort of a weird approximation but I was in my kitchen making peanut butter toast and I noticed a tennis ball on the ground.
There is now a petition to save iGoogle. Google is not always so responsive to customers, so it will be interesting to see how this goes.
Sign the petition to save iGoogle here:
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/dont-kill-the-igoogle-webportal.html
There are hundreds and hundreds of people complaining on the google forums – just in the past couple hours.
Wondering what iGoogle is and why you should want to use it? Check out these tutorials.
I found a service called Protopage which I’ve configured to give me all the news, weather and other feeds I previously used iGoogle for.
It’s not quite as glamorous looking as iGoogle but it does everything I need so rather than petition, I’ll just give iGoogle a shove right away. I do still use the Google search engine though … and I’ll keep on using Firefox instead of Chrome!
Anthony in Australia
Anthony.. I’ll have to check out Protopage… Thank you for your input.