iGoogle is Going Bye-Bye — #RootsTech

Stanczyk is sad. Google is planning on phasing out a service that allows millions of people to personalize its home page with applications such as weather updates and stock quotes. The customization service, known as iGoogle, will be turned off in November 2013. So we have about 16 months to find a similar replacement for these capabilities …

Unless you mainly use iGoogle-mobile which will be retired sooner. The mobile version will be retired at the end of this month, on July 31, 2012. More details/suggestions are here on Google’s site.

If you have been on your iGoogle page you should have seen the following on your page:

Now the reason this jester is sad is that I used this web tool as a search engine and a kind of genealogy aggregator of news/announcements from sources that are very helpful to my personal research or to keeping me informed in general on genealogical matters. It also was a landing page (portal)  for some web widgets that performed useful tricks (date calculators, language translation, etc.).

Long time readers will recall that I recommended they use this tool. So if you use iGoogle let me know. Also please let me know what you intend to do for a work-around. Google won’t you please reconsider keeping the iGoogle tool and if you need a few ideas for making it a hit web app — email me. I have a few ideas.

—Stanczyk