Google Retires iGoogle And Other Services

Since last year Google is trying to shutdown many of its not so popular known services. Recently Google has announced another round of service cleanup on their official blog. One of these services cleanups includes iGoogle. iGoogle is a service which offers users to personalize their startpage with custom gadgets. Gadgets can be news, communication tools, stocks, rss feeds, and more.

iGoogle And Other Google Services to be discontinued

Many of you, who uses iGoogle as their startpage, would be disappointed by the decision of shutting down the service. According to them, iGoogle will retire as a on of their service on November 1, 2013. The time span for almost a year is given for users to move or export their data to other services. The core reason stated for this decision, is the rise in mobile platforms like Chrome and Android, who have somewhat decreased the need for iGoogle.

Another service known as Google Video will also be terminated completely. The feature to upload videos was discontinued in May, 2009. Those of you who used this service to upload and watch videos don’t have to worry about their data,  as it will be automatically migrated to YouTube.

With the recent acquisition of Meebo, the retirement of Google Talk Chatback is close enough. It is a widget which can be used by webmasters to talk with their visitors. Now they are recommending webmasters to check out their Meebo bar.

Google Mini from July 31, 2012 onward it will be discarded as one of their service. They now suggest users to use other services like Google Search Appliance or Google Site Search.

Now the bad news for all Symbian lovers (including me), who love to download their apps from Symbian Search app. They will be shutting down Symbian Search app,so that they can focus more on their own mobile web experience. Still Symbian users can search for their apps on their search like the good old times.

In the end Google is just a company who has to think about its profit and with Larry Page as their new CEO, you will see a lot of changes in their search engine (Like the increase in the ad space in the search results). Still they don’t have to close services like iGoogle use by hundreds of thousands of users.via[techyfuzz]

So tell me, are you’re really affected by retirement of any of these services?