Google puts iPhone-optimized iGoogle portal out to pasture
By Will Park on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 12:17 PM PST In Announcements, Apple, Applications, Mobile Web, iPhone, iPhone OS
Web-based services pop-up and fizzle-out all the time in the mobile space. There’s just no telling what service will soar and which services will fail. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has apparently deemed their iPhone-optimized iGoogle.com portal a failure and has put the iPhone-customized portal out to pasture.
iGoogle.com allowed you to customize your homepage with all manner of widgets displaying sports scores, stocks, weather, and more. Google had previously rolled out an iPhone-optimized version of the iGoogle.com portal that featured expandable and collapsible headers allowing you to quickly switch between widgets. Alas, iPhone users looking to check their iGoogle.com portal will now be directed to the desktop version of iGoogle.com.
Interestingly, Google’s iPhone-optimized search portal is still a go. Searching through Google’s homepage on your iPhone will return search results specifically formatted to fit as much information on the iPhone display as possible. Google has also retained their mobile-optimized Google Reader and Google Gmail services. Why did iGoogle get the chop? How many of you out there actually used iGoogle (and how many actually used iGoogle on the iPhone)? Perhaps iGoogle’s widgets couldn’t compete with native iPhone apps that offer the same functionality (stocks, weather, sports, news, etc.).
iGoogle for iPhone, we knew ye well.
Actually, this is very likely related to the across-the-board dropping of such portal-like “start pages” from a variety of Google services, including the business- and education-oriented Google Apps suite. I suspect that control of the gadgets to be added proved to be a serious issue with undesirable side effects noticed.
I used igoogle daily and I am now sad to see it go. It should be noted that igoogle only really changed in look, but has still been retained to some extent on the iphone. The menu’s are no longer collapsable and the font is a bit smaller, but overall igoogle for the iphone has changed very little, and contrary to this publication, it does not redirect the user to the desktop version.
Hey – I use iGoogle all the time – maybe less people use it because they don’t know how powerful it is. As for the iPhone verse – who cares.