Personal content aggregators are nothing new. We recently covered the latest of many services that consolidate your social networking activity into one place. But PageOnce, a company that was on this year’s Israel Web Tour, wants to become the one stop shop for all your web-accessible accounts.
The site is still in private beta and working to expand the number of account types that it supports (TC readers can sign up here). However, you can already use the service to retrieve information from many banking, social networking, airline, email, and shopping accounts such as Citibank, Facebook, American Airlines, Gmail, and Amazon. PageOnce takes the information appropriate to each account (once you give it your username and password, of course) and displays it in a Netvibes/PageFlakes-like layout. If you have lots of accounts to manage, you can choose to view them according to type (finance, shopping, utilities, etc.).
Despite the fact that PageOnce needs to build relationships with many of the account providers in order to retrieve information from them (not everyone has an API like Facebook after all), the company has done a good job digesting information for at-a-glance presentations from a fairly wide range of providers. The “fetch once” technology behind the site, however, only pulls information from elsewhere; it doesn’t push information back, so you can’t actually make changes to your bank account while on PageOnce; you’ll need to follow links to the bank’s website itself.
PageOnce is definitely onto a good idea here, and I particularly like being able to check all my accounts without having to reenter usernames and passwords for each. However, I wonder whether a more established personalized homepage provider like Netvibes won’t swoop in and steal PageOnce’s thunder. Netvibes is already a great place to retrieve information from various web services and RSS feeds. It wouldn’t be a huge leap for them to provide widgets that could display information from a much wider range of personal accounts as well. And in fact, when I asked Netvibe’s founder Tariq Krim whether they planned to provide this functionality, he said that Netvibes is already discussing the possibility with several account providers supported by PageOnce.
PageOnce seems to have the leg up since they’ve already proven that they can aggregate this sort of information. But since they rely on their own efforts to expand support for an inexhaustible number of accounts, a more decentralized approach with Netvibes as the focal point and account providers as the widget developers themselves could win out in the long run.
>>many banking, s
This is the scary part. As long as it is harmless emails and social networking all is fine. But when it comes to banking and other sensitive data, I am not sure how much trust we can place in these site. Reminds me of Mint.com which you had profiled on your site.
Since there is no guarantee that if something goes bad, our money will still be safe.
Peyton
http://www.techbanyan.com
@Peyton – That’s very true – privacy and security are always concerns with this type of service.
Fully agree that security and privacy is the key issue. Without strong crypto, or full assurance of account info. handling, no way I would hand over my financial acct. info. More scary, is the TC poster did not even touch on this, just how well the application handles multiple accounts. This points out why there is now a mild backlash against Web 2.0 and unbridled Social Networking, enthusiastic users are finally figuring out that privacy and security actually DOES matter.
1. PageOnce enables “Fraudwatch” account monitoring which layers over your accounts to look for suspicious activity
2. Most users have same username and passwords for all their accounts. With PageOnce you can have different user names and passwords
3. PageOnce maintain bank’s level security and is certified by Verisign, eTrust and Hackersafe
4. For more information on how we keep users safe, see http://www.page...p_you_safe.html
not sure that we haven’t seen more and better before…
Has PageOnce
1) been asleep
2) in denial of OpenID http://openid.net/
3) both
PageOnce destined for the Dead Pool !
who cares about open id? The only people that seem to care are those that provide services that leech off other companies. If you have a good product the person will take the 5 seconds to put in their username and password
Yodlee has been doing this for years with their MoneyCenter site. I get all my bank/investment accounts, bills, reward/mileage points, etc in one portal. Their UI could use a little work though.
Sounds a lot like Spokeo.
Call me when there’s a aggregator for all my social aggregators ( FriendFeed, Life Stream from Vox, Pulse, Mugshot, Iminta, Ad Nauseum! ). In the mean time why not just use Twitter all by itself?
Sounds like yodlee.com?
Yodlee has been doing this well for almost a decade.
Hey Movie MAZIC (http://moviemazic.com) Does similar thing in Indian entertainment space. Can check my page http://moviemaz...wuser.php?id=61. All Users can create such pages.
Awesome site!
I like it!
Great site, as makes me drop all the headache for logins etc. The feeds are also great and it does feel like an assistant. I wanted to send my friends but didn’t see any button for that
The response from the PageOnce employee above seems to indicate that they don’t understand the fraud concern at all. I’m not nervous about them watching for fraud on my accounts. I’m nervous about handing over all my account info to this brand-new startup with zero track record.
And speaking of OpenID, why can’t I use it to leave a comment here?
I’ve still yet to see an openid solution that really works well. Also, it will be nearly impossible to get all the banks, arilines, etc on openid.
These guys are going to do well.
CC info????? What a scary page! I’d never use a site where CC info is so openly displayed.
What are these people thinking?!
PS: And they’re from Israel? Will Mossad get my info too?
i registered on the site , but can an invite from some one give me an account now ?
For those who missed that in the article. A special beta login is available for the first 1,000 TechCrunch readers. Simply click the URL here and start using PageOnce
https://www.pag...TCAXYER8EOPLK7A
It wouldn’t be a huge leap for them to provide widgets that could display information from a much wider range of personal accounts as well. And in fact, when I asked Netvibe’s founder Tariq Krim whether they planned to provide this functionality.
There is already http://www.mint.com , it works great and it’s FREE!
In the mean time why not just use Twitter all by itself?
@Mark Hendrickson: Given your acknowledgment that privacy and security are always concerns with services of this type, perhaps you could dig a little deeper into the companies technology and tell us what they are doing to mitigate those issues?
I’m thinking of putting together an online banking service.
Collect all your bankaccounts at one place.
It will be free. So I ´can access… I mean YOU can access them easier.
Mint has the right idea with regards to making me feel better about security: http://www.mint.com/safe.html
Don’t tell me what you do to make me secure, tell me what YOU do with my information. Mint does a great job of this by stating “we do not see or store that information”.
Giving the PageOnce site a good read, they say how they protect data from external sources and that security is part of their culture — but what about internal security of my data/accounts.
I don’t like the IDEA of ANYONE having access to my data, and to risk that for convenience seems a bit sad.
I was surprised PageOnce didn’t send me an email to confirm my registration, and protect me against identity thieves.
Also, I have a whole slew of user IDs/passwords for sites not covered by those tabbed by PageOnce. For now, I think I’ll stick to my handmade doc with all my registration info.
I love those guys from competing companies that post “innocent” comments like Mint is doing in 22 (John Diaz). I know of better ways to compete rather than posting your links on those articles.
“hack all your accounts in one place”
how do you avoid somebody getting in and gaining access to all sorts of financial data.
iGoogle anyone? They are the biggest threat to these existing sites.
Yeah, along with Yodlee, Bank of America has a service sort of like this as well called my portfolio where you can list different bank account, reward programs, airline miles, e-mail etc. I’ve been using the bank of America one and its pretty good, lets hope that a company that is focused just on a service like that will come up with an even better product.
@KM4: from what I have understood OpenID is just a way to log onto different sites with the same ID and password, but they do not have a site that aggregates all of your OpenID sites- if they do- that would be awesome- I guess if no one has thought of this idea, they can feel free to grab it from me
@Andrew
OpenID is not just for sites that leech information. How many times have you had to register on yet another forum for an open source application to get some information or download something?
This is ridiculously scary. Doesn’t anyone see how this is a site just waiting to be the target of hackers for identity theft?
As said, igoogle is excellent, and google browser sync, an extension for firefox, is doing great for me at the moment, remembering all my passwords, bookmarks, etc… ok, i know that in one moment or another one could question google for the same issues of security, but let’s try to live careless for one day…
Very biased comment below!
PageOnce (and all startpages like Netvibes) are quite scary, security-wise.
But can you have a web service that provides the convenience of quick access to your online accounts combined with perfect security and privacy?
The answer is yes! Just head over to Clipperz (http://www.clipperz.com).
It’s an online password manager that knows nothing about your data thanks to its heavy use of browser-based cryptography. All you data are encrypted locally by the browser itself before being uploaded to Clipperz.
And Clipperz also offers a great 1-click login feature that allows to automatically login to (almost) any website without entering username and password.
So why you need this scary PageOnce!?
Marco
Clipperz co-founder
I really enjoy the site, storing all my IDs, Frequent Flyer points… is a nightmare. But for me the best part is managing my utilities, service providers finally I will be able to keep all my open tickets with Comcast in one place:)
Well done guys!!!
Davidr.
Back to #35, Clipperz is a great company however we do not compete.
Helping you store all your credentials is a by product of what we do, however the MAIN VALUE comes from the fact we know to aggregate all the web into one place avoiding the need to login to each site to see you data, manage it or take actions.
Ahikam Kaufman, Co Founder PageOnce
We can put all our online accounts in one place using PageOnce. It is well and good. What about online security if we put our bank accounts information on this type of sites?
The content aggregators are, or at least they should be in the future a very important key in the OpenID project.
#37 @Ahikam Kaufman
What’s interesting is that the comments here all point to the same issue: security of the logins. So even if you don’t consider online password management an issue, your potential users do.
I’m a co-founder at PassPack, so I deal with these types of objections daily. People need to know that you can’t read their stuff even if you wanted to. And if you *can*… well that’s not ideal.
If you, as a company, have access to your users’ logins, then any disgruntled employee would too. That’s when problems arise.
At PassPack, no one but the user herself can access her data. Period.
Security needs to be front and central.
More on PassPack’s basic security here:
http://passpack.../info/security/
That’s a primer. If anyone needs more detailed info, just ask.
#39 @Dan
Agreed. Password managers should play a big role too – use OpenID wherever you can, then stash away your logins for all the other sites too. We’re looking forward to becoming an OpenID consumer.
Cheers,
Tara
PageOnce is quite useless at the moment for whoever is not American. All the focus is on American utilities, companies, etc.
PageOnce keeps claiming they pay attention to their users but I have yet to get a reply from my suggestions for European services… At least now it is easy to see the list of supported accounts, unlike a few months ago…
/Baro
At first glance, sounds like a great idea, but what does exactly this Pageonce do? We really don’t know, and certainly we will not know either. For now, I will keep my passwords and ID in the same place I have always kept them, in my mind.
There is not better software then ourselves, so people don’t let anyone you don’t know handle your finances. That’s what a Bank is for.
For better or for worse, they have been around for centuries. Let’s wait and see what happen in a short future.
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How does it compare to Mashed Life or Passpack?
Nothing wrong to put important credentials in one safe, but to make sure it is really safe. Maybe you need some strong protection of the safe box such as Umikey:
After putting more and more of my credentials into PageOnce, I really wish I can stop endless wrestling with password-stealing malware. What if they steal my PageOnce password?
The fight consumes so much resource and attention from you and your users. And torturing your users with longer user names and longer passwords, captcha is just not the way to go.
Even worse, some user makes a typo of your URL and landed on a phishing site. The account is taken over and all accounts are stolen.
It is time to think out of the box. And if you want to double your user base and double your revenue, make the login process easier to cover all demographics of users.
UmiKey is well received by some password managers such as Keepass and Mashed Life. I believe that will help PageOnce’s users as well.
http://umikey.c...ocs/w_pwmgr.pdf
Cheers