All good things must come to an end so goes the saying. And with the recent scheduled shutdown of Google’s Reader service, my mind goes back to a couple of my other favorite Internet services.

For instance, does PointCast‘s ring a bell? This was one of the first, or maybe even the first, push-based content services. What was that, 20 years ago…I loved the fact that it pushed news and information to me through a simple application interface and came with a great screensaver. The company could have been sold for a huge sum of money, but ultimately, it was not enough for the ownership.  They held on too long, and if memory serves, it was sold for only a fraction of what the highest offer once was.

Google is in the process of killing another of my favorite services.  iGoogle has to be one of the best home pages out there.  I found it to be a great service for holding everything from bookmarks to RSS feeds.  There were widgets of every possible combination that can be plugged into the page.  It loaded insanely quick and enabled me to access the same content information from any browser on any computer.  When the service finally dies at the end of the year, I will greatly miss it.  Netvibes is the closest replacement I have been able to find.

Even a few years back, Microsoft bought a company that offered an application that indexed your Outlook email.  It had a great search syntax and user interface.  Evidently, the technology was to be integrated in a future version of Outlook, but nothing Microsoft has released has come close to the ease-of-use and accuracy of that Outlook add-in.  I must be getting rather old because I cannot even remember the name of the application anymore.