It's a good question. The online-services market has certainly moved toward consolidation: Apple's eWorld is shutting down at the end of the month, and both Microsoft—the new focus of MCI's online affections—and AT&T have moved from closed, proprietary systems to Web-based services. (CompuServe's new "Wow" service is an obvious exception.) Given the changed business landscape, what does iGuide offer that its competitors don't?

Well, quite a bit—too much, in fact. iGuide's premise, as its name reflects, is to help its members navigate through the Internet's immense number of offerings to find worthwhile sites in their areas of interest. To that end, the service is set up as a kind of organizational grid superimposed on the Web. Visitors find 19 separate subject categories listed on iGuide's home page; each of these in turn subdivides the subject into further categories and provides links to each. Every main category offers some original iGuide content (based, wherever possible, on other News Corporation holdings like HarperCollins, TV Guide and Fox), but the service's chief offering is "inSites"—some 20,000 capsule site reviews.

If this sounds confusing, it is. The idea of providing reliable guidance through the Web may be laudable, but a structured directory such as Yahoo probably does the job as well as it can be done. The Net is simply too diffuse and unwieldy to mesh neatly with the kind of navigational overlay iGuide imposes, and iGuide's "reviews" are too brief, for the most part, to be of much real use. Rather than helping "make sense" of the Net, iGuide just adds to the noise.

(Editor's Note: perhaps predictably, iGuide did not survive.)

(Reviewed March 21, 1996)