Yodlee Your Way to Smoother Surfing

Yodlee.com consolidates your online accounts with a one-stop click.

Eileen Smith, PC World

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Yodlee.com is a Web site geared at helping you gain control of your life while retaining some semblance of online sanity. Yodlee provides consumers with one-stop consolidated access to all their personal Internet accounts, including e-mail, banking, news, travel, shopping, bills, and investments. The free online service launched as a beta version last week.

"It's complementary to a lot of personalization services," says Sukhinder Singh, co-founder and vice president of business development. "But Yodlee tracks your specific account activity across a multitude of sites."

Is your work area littered with yellow Post-it Notes bearing passwords and ID names for various online accounts and subscription services? Yodlee.com provides a central location with links to more than 600 Web sites designed to organize and manage your affairs while saving you time and hassles.

You log in from Yodlee using one password that carries multi-account access. Say goodbye to endlessly surfing among investment portfolios and e-mail, drowning in a deep blue sea of user names and passwords. And since Yodlee.com is server-based, it's available any time.

To create your very own page, select an ID and password and enter your e-mail address. Next, you can choose links from 12 information categories and voilà, instant online management. It seemed so simple I decided to try it myself.

I chose The New York Times and Travelocity for starters since I'm already a registered user at both sites. When I clicked to get to my page, I was greeted by an error message asking me to try back later due to excessive Web traffic.

"That's one constraint--we're as slow as the Web site is," Singh said. "It's one variable we can never determine when retrieving information and refreshing."

My page eventually refreshed and all was well. It's easy to reorganize and edit display categories. One question remained--how secure is this site?

Yodlee.com uses secure sockets layer protocols, multiple firewalls, and intrusion-protection technology, according to Singh. All data is encrypted and stored at a third-party data center that is kept under continuous surveillance.

Additionally, Yodlee2Go is the first step in Yodlee's mobile strategy. The free application allows you to synchronize your personal Yodlee page information with your Palm.

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