Last week I was disappointed to find out that the brilliant iphone optimised version of iGoogle had disappeared and been replaced with the standard mobile version. Rubbish. Not only do I use this version of iGoogle as my standard homepage both on laptop and mobile, but it is basically my iphone homepage (if it actually had a home page function). Nothing else compares.

The news media were pretty slow to notice this (in the end The Register and Information Week did the decent thing), not least because Google itself did not announce it officially. This is not surprising since the real reason behind this move could well have been cuts alongside other products it has ditched recently.

Google’s support forum did start filling up pretty quickly, although noone seemed to give any indication why the change had happened until Paul stated…

“we want to ensure you’ll all see the same version”

But why? The “same” version is dreadful. Google even admitted this themselves when launching the iPhone optimised version originally…

“The standard mobile version of iGoogle available at http://google.com/m is much more limited: it only displays feeds and a very small number of gadgets, you need to manually add items to your page and you can’t change the number of items displayed from a feed.” 

So this all got me thinking of alternative custom home pages. Mashable has a good article about this…although none of the examples had decent iPhone versions.

So what does a brilliant iPhone optimised custom home page need to have to meet my requirements?

• Must be fast to load…we all know how patchy that 3G coverage is
• Must display all feeds on the same page, so you scroll through them
• Must be able to limit the number of headlines displayed per feed…but importantly must be able to show more than 3 like the rubbish new google one
• Must be able to dynamically display the content of the feed without zipping off to a new page

Thats not much to ask is it?