New pests: featured news

Seems it is a new trend for service oriented sites to push at the top of their service a list of featured news they decided you want to see.

• LinkedIn Pulse: 

• How to get rid of it using adblock plus

• my.yahoo aggregated home page now headlines featured news. 
• In their tablet oriented redesign you can't have closed gadgets anymore either.
• Time to move on: I relocated my home page to igHome. Liking it: good service with plenty of gadgets. They have tabbed aggregator pages  (which comes close to closed gadgets).

iGoogle to retire

Google will retire their personalised home page iGoogle on 11/2013.
This was a pretty neat service combining RSS feeds, overview of discussion groups and financial portfolio's. You had nice gadgets like currency convertors and art of the day, all embedded in changing themes (comics, travel photo's...).
The logic behind this is not clear to me. There will be some cost shavings, but i can not imagine that iGoogle is that expensive.
Google encourages you to use Android and Chrome as a replacement. Android has nothing to do with desktops so they may be wanting to push Chrome. Strange: retiring a service is not encouraging for using another service of that same company.
There will be some collateral damage too: iGoogle gadgets pushed you towards Google discussion groups, Google Finance etc.
So it's back to My Yahoo for me, which is close, but not as slik.
Maybe I should start preparing for WordPress as well...