1-Stop Web Sites Take Users Into Account

For many people, the World Wide Web isn’t just a place to search for information. It’s also their bank, stockbroker, travel agent, newsstand, calendar, address book and where they keep track of credit cards, phone bills and much more.

In theory, having all that information in one place should make your life easier. But the Web isn’t one place. Each Web site has its own look and feel, and many sites, especially those that contain your personal information, require you to enter a unique account name and password. Keeping track of those names and passwords can be vexing. For security reasons, it’s not a good idea to use the same password for every account and, even if you want to use a single password, many Web sites have special rules about the password that is required.

I’m not complaining. I love the fact that I can get balances 24 hours a day without having to punch buttons on my touch-tone phone. I like being able to buy and sell securities online and I think it’s terrific that I can access my address book and calendar from wherever I am using online personal information management tools from Excite, Yahoo, When.com and others.

I also like being able to track my credit card statements online.

Yet, having to manage all these accounts is time-consuming.

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Fortunately, there is some relief. Yodlee.com (https://www.yodlee.com), a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based start-up, is making it easier to manage your online accounts. The free service gives you a single Web site where you can access information from many of your other accounts: investment brokers, banks, credit cards, travel reservation services, news sites and even shopping sites.

Yodlee acts as your agent. You give it the user name and password for each Web site you want to access, and it goes out and gets your information from that site. It also provides a direct link to the site, but when you click on that link it automatically enters your user name and password.

Like just about every other Web-based account, you have to pick a user name and a password. To its credit, Yodlee doesn’t require you to answer a bunch of pesky questions. You don’t even have to give it your name. And it’s easy to add sites you want to track as long as you know the user name and password for each site.

Yodlee is introducing its services in a public test period, and as a start-up firm it hasn’t worked out all the bugs. Like many Web companies, it hopes to eventually make money from advertising and merchandising deals that have yet to be finalized.

Now that I’m using Yodlee to access my accounts, it literally knows more about my accounts than I do. Now, instead of my having to go into all these separate Web sites, I can get summary information about my accounts on two Yodlee screens. One screen, called General, tracks my calendar, e-mail and travel accounts.

The other “financial” screen gives me my bank balance, credit card statements and investment data. Yodlee also can provide headline news from various news sources of your choice and information from auction sites, job placement services, and even shopping sites such as Amazon.com, CDNow and many others. I gave it my Amazon.com account information and it told me the names of the last several books I purchased. Mercifully, it didn’t quiz me to make sure I actually read them.

Yodlee will track your travel data from any of the major online reservation services. It knows, for example, about my upcoming flight from Detroit to Los Angeles that I booked through Travelocity.com, along with information about my Milwaukee trip that I arranged through Expedia.

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Privacy is, of course, an important consideration when you are giving this much information to a single site. Yodlee posts a privacy policy stating it will “not share any individual information regarding a member with any third parties.” In addition, Yodlee’s privacy statement says it “will not send you unsolicited mail using any personal information you have disclosed, unless you have given us your consent to do so, or for administrative purposes relating to your account.”

The company is a member of Truste, a credible nonprofit industry organization that certifies member companies’ adherence to stated privacy policies. Of course, anyone who knows your Yodlee account name and password can gain access to all your information so, as always, it’s critical that you keep that information private.

Yodlee also offers a free “Yodlee to Go” program for users of hand-held Palm organizers. Your flights, for example, are entered into your calendar and an alarm is set to go off an hour before the flight. Your entire travel itinerary is copied as a note in the Palm’s memo section and the phone numbers of your online travel agencies are copied into your Palm address book. The software also loads your Palm with your bank statement and investment portfolio as well as a frequent-flier mileage summary and information from your credit cards and any other online bills that you have linked to your Yodlee account.

Although Yodlee is supposed to work with Fidelity Investments, I wasn’t able to view my Fidelity account at Yodlee. A spokesperson explained that Yodlee’s ability to get information from other Web sites depends on those sites responding to Yodlee’s commands in a timely fashion. Yodlee is reportedly trying to fix the problem with Fidelity.

Microsoft Investor (https://www.investor.com) doesn’t track nearly as much information as Yodlee, but it does a very thorough job with your investment portfolio. Sites that keep track of stock prices are a dime a dozen, but MSN Investor, like Yodlee, is able to act as your agent to suck data directly from online investment accounts from Schwab, E-Trade, DLJ Direct, Waterhouse, Fidelity Investments, Discover Brokerage and PaineWebber.

MSN Investor packs all this information on one large screen, though you have to scroll to get to it all.

If you have an online account with any of these houses, you simply import it into Investor and the Web site tracks the information for you. If you buy or sell stock, that data can be automatically updated in your Investor portfolio. Investor also keeps track of dividends, splits and other transactions. It tells you how many shares you own of each security, the market value (updated throughout the day) and your average cost and gain or loss in dollars and percentages along with the net worth of all accounts.

I use it to track my Fidelity accounts and, frankly, find it more useful and more up-to-date than Fidelity’s own Web site.

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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX-AM (1070). He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is https://www.larrysworld.com.