Who Doesn’t Need a Personal Assistant?

Doug Williams | June 05, 2008, 11:06 AM

Pageonce, which opened to the public this week, claims to be the first Personal Internet Assistant. Users can register existing password-protected accounts and have information from those accounts aggregated on the user’s Pageonce page without having to remember/look up and enter the login information each time. Accounts are organized into six categories: Finance, Shopping, Utilities, Social, Travel and Email. The initial set-up is a bit time consuming, because of course you have to go through the process of actually remembering/looking up and entering the login information for each account, but the result should be increased efficiency going forward.

The business model is a twist on ad-sponsored: Account partners target promotions to the customers who have established a Pageonce connection to the partners’ sites. It’s a nice idea, because (in theory) if the customer holds an account with that company, they would be more receptive to receiving such promotional offerings, as compared to offers from a company with whom they do not have an existing relationship. And the company would be delivering such promos to a receptive audience (again, in theory).

Pageonce is not doing any advertising on its own. It is relying upon word-of-mouth, and upon account partners encouraging their customers to follow their account via Pageonce. By relying on others to generate subscribers, Pageonce can focus on improving the user and partner experience, but it also is placing its success in the hands of others (at least for now). It remains to be seen whether this is a stroke of genius or a fatal flaw.