Errol Pierre-Louis |
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Pageonce.com by Errol Pierre-Louis Rating: 4/5 Bottom Line: Pageonce simplifies your online life by letting you manage all your online accounts from one simple platform. Pros: Lets you manage a variety of online accounts from one place. More personalized content than most start pages. Can view Pageonce info on iPhone, iPod touch. Cons: No Facebook support. No open platform for third-party apps. Can't add POP3 e-mail accounts. Full Review: Instead of hopping from Web site to Web site, juggling multiple usernames and passwords, why not check up on all your online accounts from a single, secure, AJAX-based site: Pageonce.com. Using Pageonce, you can check your phone bill, bank accounts, Netflix queue, MySpace inbox, and more, without ever having to jump to a new Web page. The site has already earned a place on our list, "The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites," so we felt readers would benefit from a deeper look at what this service has to offer. In much the same manner as start pages like Pageflakes or iGoogle, Pageonce merges information from various sources into one page. But Pageonce's real strength is that it lets you access much more personal information—for example, the status of your utility bills, recent online purchases, and credit-card transactions—than typical start pages do. Since you'll be sharing such sensitive information, security is an obvious concern. The company claims its site operates under military-grade security with 256-bit data encryption. Additionally, all your info is read-only, so nobody can transfer funds via the site or edit any of the accounts you've added. Company CEO Guy Goldstein told me that he believes that the site increases your security because it allows you to monitor your financial status more easily and set up automatic alerts to catch suspicious activity on your accounts. Setting up your Pageonce is a straightforward process. Simply sign up for the service, then choose the services you want to track from Pageonce's database of service providers. You can either search for providers by name or view them by category. To start tracking a new source of information, you provide Pageonce with the log-in info for the service in question. Pageonce is much less cluttered than most of its start-page competitors; navigation is more intuitive, too. You can view your accounts by category or use the At Once page to view them all simultaneously. At Once displays basic information for all accounts on the left side of the page, and an update feed on the right shows the accounts' most recent activity. The page elements resemble widgets, but you can't move them around to customize your layout. While many start pages give you to ability to track multiple e-mail and social-networking accounts, I preferred Pageonce's features to all except iGoogle's. Pageonce isn't perfect: Although it works with a variety of e-mail providers, it doesn't let you add POP3 accounts—but it does a better job of aggregating information from social-networking sites. For instance, Netvibes and Pageflakes widgets can link you to your MySpace page, but they provide only public information, like who's on your friends list. Beyond that, you just get links that point back to myspace.com, where you can view your photos, e-mail, and other stuff. Pageonce syncs to your MySpace account, displaying new messages in your inbox and pending friend requests. The same goes for Amazon widgets: Start pages will list Amazon's best sellers or let you search the site, but Pageonce keeps you updated on your latest orders and notifies you once your books are delivered—that's very cool. The site also makes it easier to find relevant accounts. With start pages, if you don't see what you're looking for in a list of essential widgets, you have to wade through pages of useless ones before finding what you want. By contrast, Pageonce provides an easy-to-navigate list of service providers that provide the functionality you're looking for, separated by category. So when you add Flickr to your Pageonce account, it will sync up to your Flickr account, which shows your inbox and links back to your photostream, instead of finding widgets that simply post various public Flickr galleries. Pageonce doesn't currently have an open platform for developers, so you won't find the wealth of third-party apps written for most start pages. And the accounts you add must be in the service's supported list of e-mail, financial, shopping, utility, travel, and social-networking destinations. Pageonce isn't burgeoning with service providers to add to your page—the most glaring omission is Facebook—but those it has are easy to find, and the connections to them perform exactly as you'd expect. The only start page that beats Pageonce in the realms of e-mail and social networking is iGoogle, which supports more e-mail accounts, lets you view the body text with full HTML support, and gives you complete access to your MySpace and other social networks without leaving the site. Utility and iPhone Support The real strength of Pageonce is the ability it gives you to monitor financial info and keep track of your utilities. I love that I can just sign in and see my cable bill and cell-phone bill on the same page. For example, instead navigating my way through the Verizon Wireless site, I can simply click on the utilities section of the site and view peak/non-peak minutes used, amount of text messages sent and received, when your current bill cycle ends, amount due, and your next due date. I can also view my current balance and recent transactions for credit cards and bank accounts. It's nowhere near as thorough as a specialized financial-tracking site such as Mint.com, but it still does a good job. A travel section lets you add accounts from hotels, airports, and rental services so you can check on reservations, flight miles, and flight itineraries. And the shopping area helps you track recent purchases from various online stores without having to log into each merchant's site. If you own an iPhone or iPod touch, you can receive Pageonce info on the go by downloading the iOnce app from the Apple App Store. The software has an attractive, easy-to-navigate layout and displays the same information you'd find on the Web site. Once I loaded it onto my iPhone the app synced up to my Pageonce account and displayed all the accounts I'd already added online. By tapping the Feeds button at the bottom of the screen I could view the same update feeds I would see on my iOnce page online. Note, however, that you can't edit your Pageonce account using the iOnce app; it's only for viewing the latest information. Pageonce is great for keeping your online accounts in order. It's simple, easy to use, and delivers content from a wide variety of providers, personalized in a way that you can't get from start pages. And checking your various accounts from one service is far easier than hopping from site-to-site. The platform isn't open, however. You're limited to the providers Pageonce offers, and those don't include Facebook, which is a huge omission. Still, considering that you can check your accounts on many of the major players, like Amazon, Netflix, MySpace, and utility companies, the convenience is hard to beat. |