The Hot Iron

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Goodbye MyWay.com Hello iGoogle

After much deliberation, I have replaced MyWay.com with iGoogle.  As I lamented previously, MyWay, a news and information portal, replaced their highly-functional stock portfolio system with a widget from Scottrade.  As a result, the ability to manage multiple lists of stock and funds went away for a Flash object that forces you to scroll rather to seeing everything at once.  This move, plus the fact they did not inform users and a general lack of innovation over the years forced me to look elsewhere.  As comments to my original post show, I was not alone.

Here’s a screenshot of the top of my old MyWay page:

And here’s a screen shot of the top of my new iGoogle page:

I was always aware of iGoogle as I have a Google account.  However my initial reaction to it when it launched a while back was to not drink anymore Google Kool-Aid than I had to!  With MyWay’s move, I decided to give it another, objective look, and I liked what I saw.  I was able to configure iGoogle with news sources and categories of information as I had with MyWay, and then some.  The portfolio feature I lost with MyWay I was able to restore with iGoogle.

iGoogle allows a user to add a “gadget” which can be news headlines, sports scores, RSS feeds, games, et. al.  There were gadgets for headlines from newspapers like the Chicago Tribune as well as international media sources.  You can even develop your own gadgets for potential inclusion.  You can also customize the presentation of information with themes.  I haven’t experimented with themes much as I was focused on content, and there’s still a lot of widgets for me to look into.

If you use MyWay, I recommend taking a look at iGoogle.  I still have my MyWay account, and will probably hold on to it for a while as a backup.