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It's a truism on the Internet: Personalized Web pages are good.

When you visit Amazon.com (AMZN) , you're greeted by name, and given recommendations for books and CDs the company thinks you'll enjoy based on your past purchases. Portals like Yahoo (YHOO) let you to set up a personalized page with local weather, filtered headlines and a stock portfolio. Now, a new set of tools takes personalization a step further, beyond giving people the option of choosing from an internal set of elements to construct a start page.

Metabrowsing gives people a way to grab snippets of text and images from third-party sites, allowing them to build custom pages, which they can then share with others. Users can now customize a single Web page to include content as diverse as the latest Dilbert, updates on their pending eBay (EBAY) auctions and New York Observer columns, without any pesky banner ads or e-commerce links that go along with the source sites.

At least a half-dozen companies are offering different metabrowsing services, with varying degrees of customizability. The technology behind a metabrowser is no great shakes. The Web is basically a massive, unstructured database, and it's not difficult to pull nuggets of information from one URL and render it on another. But most users rarely bother to write their own HTML code to create such pages. The vast majority simply view pages in the way the original content provider intended them to be seen.

Those days could be over. Sites like CallTheShots.com, Octopus.com, Quickbrowse.com and Yodlee.com make it easy for people to combine content from multiple Web sites on a single page. Some of them have yet to fix on a business model, however, and none has thoroughly explored the legal questions their technology raises.

Quickbrowse is the simplest of the bunch. You enter a list of URLs into a form, and it combines the sites into one page. The list can be saved as a bookmark; you can click on it each morning and let the pages load while you feed the cat, or you can have the pages sent to you by e-mail at a certain time every day. The four-man company is headed by Marc Fest, a German-born journalist living in Miami. Fest built Quickbrowse as a way to load 20 news sites on a single page, so he could scan for ideas that might work as features for the German magazines he used to work for. He shared his programming efforts with fellow journalists, who encouraged him to develop a commercial product. When Fest met Andrew Tobias at a party and told him about Quickbrowse, the financial guru took a look at the site and handed him a five-figure check, large enough to give Fest time to write the code for a public version of Quickbrowse. In February, GeoCities founder David Bohnett invested what Fest calls a "good, six-figure sum" in Quickbrowse.

Of the half-dozen or so metabrowsing sites, Quickbrowse is the only service that doesn't extract individual elements from the different Web sites it combines. At this point, Quickbrowse is still trying to figure out a business model. For now, Fest says he is preening the site to attract users.

CallTheShots.com, a privately held Santa Clara, Calif., company, offers a greater degree of user customization than Quickbrowse. The company, which has had one round of venture financing and investments from Amazon.com and eBay, lets users extract pieces of any Internet sites they wish, leaving banner ads and other undesirable content behind. Once someone builds what CallTheShots calls a ComboPage, he can make it public and invite others to view it.

It's hard to imagine that Webmasters won't mind having their sites raided. CallTheShots attempts to shield itself from charges of copyright violation with a notice that informs its customers that the service is not to be used for "unauthorized copying or distribution of copyrighted works." The notice also states that it "may remove the infringing content created by or terminate the accounts of users who infringe upon the copyright, or other intellectual property rights, of others," or "unduly exposes CallTheShots.com to claims by third parties." The instructions do not describe what constitutes copyright infringement.

Warnings aside, CallTheShots cofounder and CEO Reza Moazzami contends – rather unconvincingly – that most Web sites should be delighted to have chunks of their content cherry-picked for a ComboPage, because when someone clicks on a link within an element, it will lead to the third-party Web site. "I'm sure there will always be situations where sites will express that kind of concern," says Moazzami. "What we try to do is make sure we address those concerns." He says his company, which is still in beta, has yet to receive a complaint from a third-party site.

Furthermore, there's been no industry response from the parties that stand to lose the most: advertisers. The Standard made repeated requests for comment from the Internet Advertising Bureau, but no calls were returned.
Third-party sites aren't entirely at the mercy of CallTheShots or other metabrowsers. If a Web site doesn't want its content made available to CallTheShots, it needs only to write a script that will lock out CallTheShots; most Webmasters know how to do it to prevent deep linking.
CallTheShots plans to make money by licensing its technology to portals and e-commerce sites, although Moazzami has yet to seal a deal.

Octopus.com, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is pursuing another business model. Still prelaunch, it intends to become a destination site. Octopus, which received $11.5 million in first-round funding from Redpoint Ventures, wants to make money by charging content providers for inclusion in its directory of preselected Web sites. "Our proposition to partners is this: We will make 20 versions of your homepage [customized for each user] and send users deeper into your content," says Octopus CEO Steve Douty, a former Hotmail executive.

While CallTheShots, Octopus and Quickbrowse are still in beta, Yodlee.com, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., which launched in January, is a somewhat different animal from the other three. Yodlee users can set up a customized page that provides a quick snapshot of personal data: bank balances, frequent-flier miles, brokerage accounts, Web-based e-mail status and so on. Yodlee has developed access scripts for 11,000 Web sites, so when Yodlee customers enter their password, Yodlee logs in to their accounts and displays all pertinent account information.

With 100 employees and investments from Accel and Sequoia Capital, Yodlee currently is the largest metabrowser effort under way. Its revenues come from charging partners like AltaVista and Intuit (INTU) both a licensing fee and a per-user fee. Yodlee's membership and revenue figures were unavailable.

The problem with all these sites, says Mark Kennedy, a Web developer at a large investment advice firm (which he asked not to identify), is the way in which they let people "grab content at an atomic level," and then present it in ways in which the creator of the content may not like. "Just because it is easy to take content on the Net doesn't mean it's right," he adds. In the end however, Kennedy concedes that metabrowsers present "a large benefit because they make it easy for people to click back to our site."