My personal information is scattered across the web

Since I've signed up for both a backpack and a Flickr account, I have realised that my personal information is scattered all over the web. (I have often whinged about the sheer number of usernames and passwords I have to remember, but that's another matter). For instance, I need to interact with/check these locations on a regular basis:

• Outlook at work. Fortunately I can access this through the web, because I get most of my email through my work account. I also keep appointments in the Outlook calendar, and very occasionally keep tasks in Outlook.
• Gmail account. I haven't really given this out publicly, so it's not heavily used, but I do use it to store some utility programs that I might need when away from my main computers.
• sarah.geek.nz email account. My hosting provider provides three web interfaces to it, but I usually forget to check.
• purplestarfish.co.nz email account. Again, same hosting provider, and same problem. I have set up a forwarder, but I'm not sure I trust it.
• This blog. I keep shortcuts to it in my main home and work computers, but it's relatively easy to get to. Once it's public and people are leaving comments though, I might need to check it.
• Backpack. This is more for my eyes only, as opposed to the blog posts, which are more thought out and (hopefully) better articulated than my Backpack musings. I keep some reminders in my Backpack, but it's mostly just thoughts in progress.
• Amazon wish list. Books I want to read are here. In all likelihood I won't buy many of them from Amazon (shipping costs to New Zealand are quite high), but it's a good way to keep track of books I want to read.
• 43 Things. I have just started keeping track of some of my goals in 43 things. I'm not sure whether this is something that will actually prove useful to me, or whether it's just a sort of social thing of passing interest. We'll see.
• RSS Bandit. I have a number of feeds that I subscribe to, but these are tracked in RSS Bandit which is only on my work computer, so I can't access these from anywhere else.
• Trademe (NZ's equivalent of eBay). When I have auctions in progress or when I am looking for something, I need to keep my eye on this.
• Bank Accounts. I have 7 accounts with 3 different banks, plus a few shares. To get an up-to-date picture of my financial situation, I need to check them all.
• Internet Links. Currently, all my internet shortcuts are in the Internet Explorer Favourites on my work computer. I am considering del.icio.us or similar to keep track of them, but haven't yet.

Now, all of these different web sites isn't a bad thing - they each perform different tasks, and its just not feasible for there to be a single killer application to do everything. But it does seem as though things could be improved with a little bit more communication between them. For instance, why can't I use my RSS Bandit feed subscription information to generate the list of links on my blog? And why can't my Backpack and my Outlook appointments be synchronised? And why do I need to go to so many sites to check my mail and RSS feeds? I'm sure with a bit of fiddling I could get a email client configured where I could check all my email, but could I get a web email client to do that so I could check it from anywhere? And could it also include my RSS feeds?

There are two related aspects to these communication problems - the private interface and the public face.

The private interface is a central place, a portal if you will, where I can get an overview of everything and that acts as a convenient jumping off place for me to get to all these other sites. I probably wouldn't need to see things that I already know about, and that aren't being changed by others (like posts on my blog, or my Amazon wishlist), but I do want to see everything that has changed that is relevant to me. This personal portal could give me a quick indication of how many feeds I have to read, how many email messages in each of my accounts, my bank balances, comments left on my blog, cheers left on my 43 things, and give me access to my internet shortcuts. To do this, it will need to be able to aggregate information from all these various sources.

The public face stems from the desire to share part of myself with other people. This community spirit motivation is a large part of what makes things like blogs, 43 things and del.icio.us successful. So, I would like other people to see what feeds I read, to see what books I want to read, to see my goals, see my favourite sites and favourite feeds. Having a single personal portal can help make this easier, by keeping track of things like the feeds I read most often, the sites I visit most often and things like that. These can then be exposed for display on a blog or whatever other medium I use for my public face.

For some of these things, the interconnectivity technology is already there (or partly there), for others it will still need to be worked on. The bank information particularly will be difficult because of the security issues.

I would love to create an application to do something like this, but it has to wait until my PhD is finished. Maybe if nobody has come up with what I'm looking for by then I will give it a go. It should be called something like "Center of Attention". (Names are important - I can't start a project without having an appropriate and meaningful name for it.)