iGoogle

» see igoogle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

igoogle launched on may 19, 2005 under the original name "google personalized homepage". the product was google's answer to the my yahoo and excite-style portal pages of the late 1990s, ported into the new ajax era. you opened google.com, switched on the personalized version, and instead of the empty search box you got a customizable grid of small widgets called gadgets. each gadget was a tiny live applet: weather for your city, your gmail inbox count, a feed of headlines from a news site you read, a sticky-note pad that synced across machines.

the rename to "igoogle" happened on april 30, 2007 alongside a redesign that added themes, more advanced gadget layouts, and a developer API for third-party widgets. by february 2007 about 7.1 million people were using the service, and a year later in april 2008 google estimated that close to 20 percent of all hits to google.com were going to the personalized version. for a window between roughly 2007 and 2010 igoogle was the default start page on a meaningful slice of the world's home computers, including in offices and schools that pinned it as the homepage for new browser installs.

i used igoogle around 2008 through about 2011. ttnet broadband at home in ankara, firefox open in the morning, the personalized tab loading in with my gmail count and a small block of RSS headlines from donanimhaber and a couple of english tech blogs. it was the kind of background utility that you set up once and then forgot was there. the gadget i used most was the gmail preview, which let you see new mail without opening another tab. the second most useful one was a clock that showed both ankara and US east coast time at once, which mattered for working with people abroad.

~ the record ~

~ the final blow ~

google announced the shutdown on july 3, 2012, with sixteen months of notice ahead of the actual end date. the official reason given on the keyword blog was that "with modern apps that run on platforms like chrome and android, the need for igoogle has eroded over time". the same post pointed users at chrome's apps page, google now, and google+ as the suggested replacements. nobody in the comments was happy about that list, and the suggested replacements never quite did the same job.

the deeper reason was strategic. by 2012 google was moving most of its consumer attention to mobile and to google+. igoogle's gadget API was an old code path that did not fit either of those priorities. it also competed with google now, the assistant-style ambient information surface google was rolling out on android. shutting igoogle freed the team to focus on those newer products and removed a maintenance load from a desktop-era runtime that the company no longer wanted to invest in.

the service went dark on schedule on november 1, 2013. the gadget directory was removed, the personalized page returned to the standard google.com search box, and the API for third-party widget developers was deprecated. there was no migration tool that brought your widget configuration anywhere useful. on the morning of november 1 you opened your browser, hit your homepage, and got the regular google search box where your customized grid had been the day before.

~ the legacy ~

the lost habit of a personal start page. for most people who used igoogle, the customized homepage was the default browser action for years. its removal moved that surface to google now, then to google assistant, then to nothing on desktop at all. the modern equivalent on a phone is a feed of cards, but on a desktop browser the personalized homepage as a category basically died with igoogle. a few power users moved to netvibes or built their own with self-hosted dashboards. most people just accepted the empty google.com page and forgot the gadgets had been there.

the developer ecosystem. the google gadgets API had thousands of third-party widgets at peak, ranging from currency converters to small games. when igoogle shut down that whole ecosystem deprecated overnight. some of those developers moved to chrome extensions. most of the gadgets were abandoned. the gallery of small useful tools built by hobbyists for a personalized desktop tab was a 2000s web phenomenon that did not have a clean successor surface, and igoogle was the biggest single host for it.

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