SAN FRANCISCO (03/13/2000) - To find what you need online, you're probably jumping from one Web site to the next. But once you've actually found what you're looking for, how will you ever remember where it is?
Consider ezlogin.com's new LiveClips service. With it, you can take pieces of information that are scattered all over the Web and put them together on one page.
LiveClips is now available as a public beta. Developer ezlogin hopes to have the final version up by the end of March. Like everything else on ezlogin, it will be free.
Ezlogin.com is a Web site designed to help you manage multiple Internet accounts. With its utilities, you can save your login names and passwords for various sites, and automate the process of completing online forms. You must have an ezlogin account to use LiveClips.
How do you use it? Suppose you often go to PC World.com to check the latest news stories. With a few clicks and a little typing, you can put an updateable copy of the Today's News box on PC World's home page onto your ezlogin LiveClips page. Then, if you like a particular page with a small display of the local weather, you can add that, in its own box, to the same page. The next time you visit your LiveClips page, you can read the latest computer news headlines and see if the sun will be shining tomorrow.
Once you've added pieces of several Web pages to a LiveClips page, you'll want to arrange them. The program does this through simple a drag-and-drop operation, although the execution is slow and clunky. One nice touch, however, is a Detach button in each box that lets you put a copy of that box in a separate, free-floating window.
Focus on Simpler Surfing
LiveClips is ezlogin's second application for collecting and displaying data from different Web sites. But it differs from the first offering, OneClick Summary, which only works with Web sites that support it. LiveClips can give you a window into just about any Web page. (See link to "OneClick Summary Surfs the Web for You" at right for details.)Of course, some pages are exceptions. LiveClips can't yet handle plain text pages--it needs a page that contains tables or graphics. Luckily, the pages on most major sites fit the bill. Representatives of ezlogin say they're working on straight text support, but won't project when that feature will be available.
If you check a lot of Web pages regularly, LiveClips may be a good reason to sign up with ezlogin.com. But it works best if all you need is small bits of information from various pages.