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OnePage.com, Yodlee, and VerticalOne offer access to everything from bills to home pages.
"Have it your way." I always liked that idea when Burger King hawked it, and I like hearing it now from firms promising to serve up the Internet your way, on a single Web page.
Companies such as OnePage.com, Yodlee, and VerticalOne are taking personalization far beyond the horoscope and local weather reports that you get from veteran offerings such as My Yahoo or My Excite. The new entrants give you free access to your bank account, credit card account, bills, investments, and frequent flyer miles, as well as to your Web-based e-mail accounts--all on one Web page.
Each personal portal meets your needs differently. Yodlee and VerticalOne act as agents, accessing and retrieving account information from scattered sources on your behalf. Both reformat the content and package it neatly in one place. In contrast, OnePage.com lets you mix and match portions of any site onto one Web page. It can aggregate parts of Web sites, letting you peek at your bank balance alongside your child's school lunch menu. Its closest competitor, Octopus.com, offers a more limited set of options.
Currently, fewer than 5 percent of Web surfers use even the most popular personalization services, such as My Yahoo, that have been around for years, says David Card, senior analyst at Jupiter Communications.
But take a good look at the new offerings; you might like what you see.
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