time for someone to do personal aggregation again

Back in Bubble 1.0 when we were doing Spyonit.com, there were a slew of companies in a similar space (we were doing consumer "alerts") that were in the business of "personal aggregation". That is, they logged into all of your accounts for you, scraped the HTML off those sites, and re-presented them to you in one dashboard.

remember companies like :

VerticalOne now points to a domain squatter.

All these companies failed miserably at what they were trying to do, mostly because scraping HTML sucks. It really does, trust me. HTML web sites change all the time, in all sorts of little ways. You just can't run a business scraping HTML; it doesn't scale. It takes too many monkeys to keep up.

But in these days of mashups, and Web 2.0 open APIs and structured data (read XML), I'm surprised someone isn't taking another crack at this. One place to go to get all the stats, balances, etc that can all be fetched securly over HTTPS in the background, and presented with that all that cool web 2.0-like flair.

I'm sure MyYahoo! and the other portals do some of this, and it seems kind of to be what Swivel is going after, but more individualized and not business focused.

Quite frankly, a new startup would probably do a better job at this than the portals, just because they could be more nimble and not worry about all the legal ramifications of dealing with the unwashed masses.

I'm sure also that it will be suggested that all this just piggyback on RSS and be presented in the right feed aggregator, which might someday be a good idea once RSS shakes it's authentication problems.

alright, it's late here, and this James Bond movie is starting to get scenic. ciao.

technorati tags: insomnia, firefox, xbox 360, skype, iraq

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