Give Pageonce the Onceover

Is there any aspect of our lives that we don’t manage on the internet these days? Maybe one or two, but over the last decade or so (pretty much since the appearance of the first graphical web browser), we have gradually adopted the net as our virtual bank manager, stock accountant, financial housekeeper. It’s where we get our news, sports, movies, music, blogs, weather, photos, and with the emergence of web 2.0 it’s now where we find friends and even dates.

All these different sites require different logins, and Sciencetext has discussed convergence, OpenID, and password storage. And, while we’ve all tried iGoogle, My Yahoo! and the rest of them, none has succeeded in unifying all this potential for information overload. Until now, that is.

Step into the spotlight, Pageonce. Mooted as the first Personal Internet Assistant, it is, says the site’s creators “a smart and secure way to manage everything that matters to you in one place, instantly.”

Start up involves registering with a valid email address (make sure your email account is secure and has a strong password as you will be using it to access a lot of critical personal and private information. The site uses a “Fetchonce” technology to then give you access to all your online accounts whether banking, social media, bookmarking, or dating. I’m not 100% sure that my bank’s terms and conditions would allow me to use such a proxy login, and I’m certainly not going to test them, but I am happy to have one place to login in to a whole bunch of possibly less sensitive systems, such as your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Gmail accounts. You can also add bank balances, credit card limits, investments, cell phone usage alerts. You can track purchases from Amazon, eBay and Costco, monitor frequent-flyer accounts, watch out for Netflix releases, and new YouTube videos.

Other accounts you might want to add include your WalMart account, Opera Email, Photobucket,
Cathay Pacific, Holiday Inn, Reliant Energy, Portland General Electric, Bookkit, yelp, Sillicon Valley Power, and pretty soon, I suspect everything else in the areas of finance, shopping, utilities, social & fun, travel, and email.

But, is it safe? With all those accounts hanging on a single email address and password, would you feel safe. Big organizations get hacked/cracked on occasion, whole databases and lists of credit card details go astray, what happens when someone breaks into your Pageonce account and takes over not just your credit card, but your electricity supply, your cell phone, and your email. It would be identity theft gone wild. It sounds like a great idea, centralized access to all aspects of your life online. But, personally, I’ll be limiting my use of Pageonce to trivial accounts and certainly not adding banking or other financial or business accounts.