In memoriam
iGoogle
Born May 2005. Died 1 November 2013.
iGoogle passed on 1 November 2013, having lived eight years as the place where the web could be home. Born in May 2005, it offered a personalised start page: widgets, feeds, weather, games. At its peak it claimed seven million users and twenty percent of Google’s homepage traffic. Mobile apps arrived. The start page became obsolete. Google announced the shutdown in July 2012. On 1 November 2013 the URL redirected to the search page. No announcement marked the day. The company had said the need had eroded over time. He is survived by every dashboard that replaced him, and by the memory of a time when the web had a front door you could decorate.
The need for something like iGoogle has eroded over time.
Discontinued by parent company
Mourned by Those who customised their start page, users who gathered widgets and feeds in one place, and anyone who remembers when the web had a home.
The dashboard, which lives on in every browser; mobile apps, which replaced the portal; and the memory of seven million users who lost their home page.