Bye-bye, iGoogle; a moving tale

Alice and the Red Queen run­ning hand in hand — Illus­tra­tion to the sec­ond chap­ter of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Look­ing Glass by John Tenniel.

Rats. I know very well by by now that keep­ing pace with tech­nol­ogy is like run­ning with the Red Queen. In fact, I usu­ally wel­come new prod­ucts and inno­va­tions with eager­ness. But then, this unwel­come mes­sage showed up at the top of my iGoogle page, and struck at the foun­da­tion of my long-time (web) home like an evic­tion notice:

Sigh. The Google ser­vice I use most, about to retire. Still, there’s 16 months remain­ing to find another ser­vice to replace iGoogle; this post talks about my first attempt to tran­si­tion to some­thing new.

To explain: I’ve been using iGoogle as my web homepage/portal/dashboard for some time now, both on the Fire­fox and Chrome browsers. It is a com­bi­na­tion of an RSS aggre­ga­tor, a por­tal for GTalk and Google+, a home for wid­gets such as local weather fore­casts and my vir­tual pet ham­ster … (more about him later). In short, it was a quick place to start the day, catch up on news, and fol­low some favorite blogs.

Using iGoogle as a home page gives me a one-stop overview of selected web con­tent, and I gen­er­ally used it as a jump­ing place for more in-depth read­ing. For me, iGoogle pretty much serves as a web-based, self-designed, press clip­ping agency — to use a 19th-century anal­ogy –for top­ics of inter­est. It may not be the trendi­est tool for doing this, and is get­ting a bit elderly and dated-looking after seven years, but it also rep­re­sents sev­eral years of my web-crawling, find­ing inter­est­ing feeds. Imag­ine iGoogle as a house­boat, anchored in a fast-running river, a good place to sit and watch head­lines and trends flow by. Now, I find it will soon be imper­a­tive to jump the ship I’ve called home for what seems like for­ever. (Four years at most. Did I men­tion how fast that data stream moves?)

There are quite a few blog posts ¹ that describe iGoogle alter­na­tives. Netvibes is among the most fre­quently men­tioned iGoogle replace­ments, a page that has a sim­i­lar portal-like appear­ance, the abil­ity to add feeds and wid­gets, (just like iGoogle), with apps, exten­sions, and some new fea­tures, such as tabs, and the abil­ity to have mul­ti­ple “dash­boards” about dif­fer­ent top­ics. Another plus is that Netvibes has an import fea­ture that promises to bring over as much iGoogle con­tent as it can using a sim­ple import tool. I don’t want to re-create all of my blog links, so I decided to give Netvibes a try.

Netvibes first invited me to chose a chan­nel of inter­est, so I selected the “high-tech” one, because it already con­tained some of the feeds I fol­low. This is what the “vanilla” Netvibes page trans­formed into:

… as com­pared to my iGoogle page, which looks like this:

Most of my iGoogle con­tent is RSS feeds from blogs; the weather and ham­ster wid­gets are Google third-party add-ons; on the left side is a dash­board show­ing the avail­abil­ity of friends and col­leagues for chat or video calls, and at the top is a reminder that I have one new mes­sage in Google+.

I notice that Netvibes is not just one page, as is iGoogle, but has a series of cus­tomiz­able tabs, and an abil­ity to switch Dash­boards, if I want to check out other top­ics in addi­tion to high-tech one I selected.

On the blog tab in Netvibes, is Netvibes’ own blog, includ­ing a post that looks very help­ful:

Three steps sounds good!

To begin, I logged into the iGoogle account I want to con­vert, and down­loaded a file by click­ing on a link given in the Netvibes blog post above — I saved the down­loaded xml file to local disk using a sim­ple text editor.

Sec­ond, I opened the down­loaded xml file, to see that the xml describes all my iGoogle feeds and gad­gets. This, I think, is look­ing promising.

As instructed, I copy and paste the xml into the first box on the Netvibes blog page:

Next, I con­verted the XML to OPML by click­ing the but­ton under the Netvibes text box where I’ve just pasted the XML. More code mag­i­cally appeared in box 2!

I then copied the OPML code from the sec­ond box to a new text file, and saved it to my desktop.

To com­plete the third step, I needed first to cre­ate a free account at Netvibes. That only took fill­ing out a sim­ple screen with user­name, pass­word, valid email address, and a captcha field:

After agree­ing to terms of ser­vice and sub­mit­ting, I checked my email for a val­i­da­tion link to acti­vate my new Netvibes account. One click later, and I was signed into my own Netvibes page, which also remem­bered my choice to have a “high-tech” dashboard.

Now, to trans­fer my feeds from iGoogle, I clicked on the big green “Add Con­tent” but­ton at the top left of my Netvibes home page, and selected the “Add a Feed” option:

In small print under the text box to add a feed, I see options to import or export OPML. Those are the tools I’m look­ing for.

I import the iGoogle OPML backup I just cre­ated by upload­ing the saved text file.

(46 feeds are imported in about two sec­onds! This new house­boat isn’t so bad!)

I also see an option next to the OPML tools in the Add Con­tent box to down­load a Fire­fox exten­sion for Netvibes. I grab that too.

All my blog feeds are now on my Netvibes Home page:

The RSS feeds I imported are in no par­tic­u­lar order, and look a bit bor­ing, so I’ll have to arrange them as I like later. The weather wid­get and the vir­tual pet ham­ster didn’t make the tran­si­tion, nor did I expect them to, as they were writ­ten expressly for iGoogle, but the Netvibes blog informs me that they are cur­rently work­ing an a new tool to import iGoogle apps.

I now have a new Netvibes account, and six tabs full of con­tent to explore. My old feeds are all intact on my new Home page, and I see there is much con­tent to explore on the other tabs. I’ll update this post after I’ve moved the fur­ni­ture and dragged things around on what might be my new per­son­al­ized web home page.

For now I see, there are themes (!) and views to spruce up feeds to mess around with, so I’ll catch up on this topic later.

Bye-bye ham­ster, I’ll miss you.

(Update: aBowman’s ham­ster wid­get also lives in Netvibes. So, new house­boat also allows pets!)

Ani­mated ham­ster wid­get, cre­ated by aBowman.

Update: New Netvibes per­sonal home page, pret­ti­fied. The ham­ster rests his case:

Weather, a feed ticker, pretty pics and a sleep­ing ham­ster. Home, again.