What’s the next Google service to be closed down?

Many people are still reeling from the closing of Google Reader. Personally, I lost my innocence when they scrapped iGoogle. So the question is which one of their essential, life-sustaining services are they going kick off the island next?

Google offers so many services and I doubt there is anyone who uses all of them all the time. So my predictions are based on the services I do use and what I see happening in that realm at the moment. Currently I’ve been poking around a few development tools and javascript libraries, and the thing I noticed was that for newer projects Google is using Github rather than Google’s own Project Hosting to share open source code.

So my prediction for the next Google service to go to the big server farm in the sky is . . . Project Hosting on Google Code!

Besides the projects that they’ve started hosting on Github, there’s also the fact they’ve split-off a lot of content that used to be code.google.com to developers.google.com.

Closing down their project hosting service will be more significant than closing down iGoogle or Reader, since it’s not just an end-point but rather a distribution channel for many open source projects (although none of any significance from outside Google – apart from Eclipse Labs and Apache Extras but even they’re in a separate sub-domain).

Although it is not a creation point, so all the data that is there is created apart from Project Hosting and transferring to new service should be almost seamless (for the creator). Even issues created for a project can already be exported quite easily.

It would be disappointing to see Google Project Hosting close down, they offer more features than almost any other hosting service (with the exception of Source Forge). It’s not the prettiest code hosting site on the internet but it has a clean interface and they support multiple version control systems, binary file distribution, and seamless integration with other Google services (like Blogger and Groups).

And of course, you are never being pushed towards a paid version, or restricted because you aren’t paying. Big or small, sucessful veteran or new upstart, all projects are treated equally.

So if we’re going to play Google Service Roulette, I’m betting the next one to go down is Google Project Hosting. They’ll start by no-longer creating new projects, then no longer accepting updates to existing projects, and then they’ll strongly encourage everyone to migrate (probably to Github) as they announce the end date.

Cross-posted on 2FatDads

What will replace iGoogle?

In just over a year – on November 1st, 2013 – Google will pull the plug on another service. This time it won’t be some obscure 20% project that only handful of people ever heard about, let alone used. This time it will be iGoogle!

iGoogle is the start page for a lot of internet browsers around the globe. It’s the place where many of us go first thing in the morning to see our new e-mails, our agenda, read the news, and access our Google Drive.

Google seems to think the web has evolved to the point where iGoogle is no longer necessary. And they suggest that mobile apps and Chrome extensions will fill the void. Which I can believe on my phone – I’ve never used the mobile iGoogle homepage on my smartphone. But for my desktop and laptop I have not yet found a Chrome app that satisfactorily replaces iGoogle. And ofcourse you can’t take a Chrome Extension with you when you log in from another computer, or even a different browser.

There are a couple other alternatives too: NetVibes and Protopage. We’ll see if Google changes their mind if the drive to either of these two dashboards heats-up.

NetVibes is the more mature and feature rich platform, while Protopage still has some work to do to smooth things out and fill in the gaps.

Both are based on the idea of feed reading; and NetVibes has a beautiful reader mode that is worth it to make the switch from Google Reader. There are a few quirks to get used to:

• you can’t easily share, e-mail, or mark an item while viewing the full item – you have to check the item and then access the action menu at the top right – but you there are quick-access icons for this in both compressed header and tiled mosaic views;
• share options are limited to Facebook and Twitter, whereas Google Reader offered many more options and the ability to define your own; and
• there’s no starring or tagging, which admitted was of limited usefulness in Google Reader since it became subservient to Google+ but it would be nice if NetVibes offered it.

Hopefully NetVibes will get ambitious and challenge not just iGoogle but Google Reader too – the defacto king of feed reading.

Protopage only displays feeds in boxes as separate widgets, but it is possible to combine several feeds into one widget so you can compress it somewhat. But you can’t streamline it into one continuous feed.

The other thing a dashboard needs is active widgets. Not just the weather or the quote of the day; but e-mail, calendar, twitter and more. Widgets that you can interact with and manipulate the contents of.

In this case NetVibes definitely has the lead over Protopage with a well documented API and easy to use widget showcase. Unfortunately since NetVibes (or Protopage) isn’t hosting any of this data (unlike iGoogle that was hosted by the same people who host your GMail, GCalendar, GTasks, etc.) you need to authorize the dashboard widget to access that data. The essential NetVibes widgets seem to have this ability but the third-party widgets don’t – it’s not part of the API! So you can view your Google Calendar if you make it public but you can’t update it.

Hopefully we’ll see NetVibes and Protopage improve their API’s and either internally or with the help of independent third-party developers build widgets that let us re-create our iGoogle dashboard without having to abandon all the other stuff we have with Google – at least until they discontinue it!

Cross-posted on 2FatDads