Keep It to One Page!

Thanks to an ever-increasing deluge of digital information, many of us have computer desktops that look like our physical ones. But instead of being crowded with Post-it Notes, paper, folders, and magazines, our virtual workspaces are cluttered with electronic documents, links to the Web, and software applications.

Recently, a new set of tools have emerged to help us control our digital lives, giving us a way to consolidate information into one place -- even onto a single Web page. ("Keep it to one page" isn't just the mantra of résumé writers anymore.)

The idea of a personal Internet portal is nothing new, of course. Excite and Yahoo! have had "My Page" features for years. But these new tools are taking the concept to the next level, with better functionality, added flexibility, and greater ease of use. Some tools let users assemble collections of Web pages, or parts of Web pages, into a single browser window. Others are designed to capture and organize the bits and bytes that we need on our hard drive, as well as on the Web.

What can these tools actually do for you? How much time do you need to spend up front to save time down the road? To find out, Fast Company tested four of the Web's most popular organizational tools. We rated each tool based on functionality (How much can you do with it?) and ease of use (How easy is it to get the tool up and running? How hard is it to add new information later?). Here's what we learned.

QuickBrowse (www.quickbrowse.com)
Functionality **
Ease of Use ****

Quickbrowse is just that -- a quicker way to browse the Web. The tool was created by Marc Fest, 33, a Florida-based freelance journalist who was searching for an easier way to surf the Web, so that he could spend more of his free time doing what he loves: surfing the waves. When he couldn't find a tool to help him browse the 20 or so newspaper sites that he visited each day, he wrote Quickbrowse. He told a few of his friends about the tool, and, like every good idea on the Web, word of Quickbrowse spread quickly.

Quickbrowse isn't an especially robust tool, but what it lacks in functionality it makes up for in ease of use. Getting started couldn't be easier. Just register by entering your email address and a password, and you can begin to enter the URLs that you want to browse. Hit the "Quickbrowse" button, and the tool stitches together the sites into one long, scrollable page. The pages look exactly how they would appear if you visited them individually, and all of the links work. When you click on a link, a separate browser window opens for the new page.

Sound easy? Well, it gets better. Once you've created a master page, you can save it to Quickbrowse's home page so you can access your master page without retyping your list of URLs. You can also create multiple master pages. We created a daily-news page as well as a technology-news page. Each page pieced together information from five different sites. Although there's no limit to the number of sites that you can add to a Quickbrowse page, it's a good idea to keep your page count to a reasonable number. The more sites that the service has to piece together, the longer it will take for each master page to load.

Could a service this easy get any easier? Absolutely. You can have your Quickbrowse pages delivered to your email inbox. Select a delivery time, choose a frequency (daily, weekly, or monthly), and decide how you want to view the text (as an email in HTML or as an attachment). You can even specify the date or the day of the week that you'd prefer to have the message delivered.

The site is elegantly simple, but it's not perfect. When we used Quickbrowse, the tool was identical to the one that was designed by programming hobbyist Fest, for his personal use. The user interface wasn't the slickest, and the site was a bit slow and clunky. The tool also had a hard time handling sites such as the Wall Street Journal's, which requires users to log on to gain access to its contents. However, these problems will be addressed in the tool's latest version. And if Quickbrowse can solve them, then we'll definitely sign up -- quick!

OnePage (www.onepage.com)
Functionality **
Ease of Use *

OnePage is similar to Quickbrowse, but instead of combining entire Web pages, this tool lets you take your favorite parts of Web pages and put them onto a single site. OnePage also lets you add images, headlines, and tables. Unfortunately, the process for building these metapages is cumbersome, and it doesn't always work. For example, when we went to Fast Company's home page, the tool didn't display all of the images on the site. When we chose one of the images that it did display, named it, and added it to our OnePage, it mistakenly added two copies.