Then Yahoo came along and began to make the Web a more customizable place. It offered something called My Yahoo, which enabled personalization of news, sports, financial data, entertainment and all the rest. It was clear that consumers loved this control over which information they saw, and you just knew that this trend would evolve, as tech trends so rapidly do, into something even more useful.

In the past few months, several new services have emerged that promise to take the personalization revolution to new levels. Chief among them are Octopus.com, CallTheShots.com, Quickbrowse, Katiesoft and Yodlee. These services all offer an experience we might refer to as "metabrowsing." Is metabrowsing going to catch on? It's too early to tell.

1. OCTOPUS.COM
http://www.octopus.com

Still in preview form, Octopus has perhaps the most promise but also the biggest obstacle to securing public acceptance. It relies on a small but required Java-download in order to use its next-generation tools.

But what amazing tools they are. They take portal personalization to a new level by giving you total control over how you view and save your customized "views." These views can be of your own making (although the content is currently limited to News, Sports, and Stocks while in preview), or you can benefit from the work of others who have created custom Views of their own and made them publicly available. This flexibility is what makes Octopus shine, but it does have its warts.

Aside from the Java download issue, Octopus currently requires that users have Internet Explorer 5 installed. Sorry, Netscape and Mac lovers! The company promises to support those platforms in the near future, however. All in all, Octopus is really not that different from the customization options of the major portals. There are some neat benefits to Octopus, but I have to wonder whether timid folks will spend the time to learn Octopus.

Rating: 2 out of 3 stars

2. CALL THE SHOTS
http://www.calltheshots.com/

A similar technology is being developed by CallTheShots, which was selected at a recent trade show as one of Red Herring's Top 20 most promising technology companies. Of the services discussed here, CTS faces perhaps the biggest hurdles to consumer adoption.

With CTS, you create Combo pages that are comprised of various "blocks" of your favorite sites. Say you wanted to create a custom financial page drawn from MarketWatch.com, Motley Fool and TheStreet.com. With CTS, you grab various blocks of text and images and save them on one page among blocks from other sites, forming a sort of jigsaw puzzle. It takes a while getting used to it, but once you master the process, you'll be piecing together Combo pages like an old pro.

CTS is fun and will no doubt have a bright future, but the company - still in beta - will need to improve the functionality and speed of the service before you find your grandma using it.

Rating: 2 out of 3 stars

3. QUICKBROWSE
http://www.quickbrowse.com/

Quickbrowse's metabrowsing offering is probably the easiest to grasp and therefore has a high chance of public acceptance. The registration process is speedy, and you can create many custom Masterpages easily.

Masterpages are continuous pages that stitch together your favorite sites. Say you want a technology news page made up of CNET, ZDNet and Wired News. Piece of cake. Simply enter the URLs of the sites, hit the Quickbrowse button, and you'll be taken to one huge page of your favorite sites stacked on top of each other. You can even "bookmark" other people's Masterpages in your control panel area and have your Masterpages e-mailed to yourself every day for fast access.

Quickbrowse is so easy, I think it will be the first to gain widespread acceptance. It's very straightforward and simple to use.

Rating: 2.5 out of 3 stars

4. YODLEE
http://www.yodlee.com/

Are you bogged down by the weight of your multiple online accounts? Then use Yodlee to centralize them. Set up your various online accounts, and Yodlee provides a control panel to manage and access these accounts - everything from e-mail to auction listings - without having to sign in manually.

It will even tell you whether you have new e-mail at, say, Hotmail and provide the sender's name and the subject of the message ... without even logging in! This isn't the only metabrowsing feature of Yodlee, though. Along with managing your personal accounts in one location, you can also designate content channels that you want to follow, such as CNET, WebMD and Entertainment Weekly. The effect is that you're essentially building your own personal portal, much like Octopus.com, but here you're adding online account management to the mix.

The downside is that Yodlee is a wee bit too slow at this stage in its development. But, if it can improve the site's performance and make it even easier to set up accounts to manage, Yodlee will gain a strong foothold in the nascent metabrowsing market.

Rating: 2 out of 3 stars

5. KATIESOFT
http://www.katiesoft.com/
2.4 MB download

The only one of this bunch that is not a Web-based service, Katiesoft is a free metabrowser that can open up to 4 separate browser windows - called panes - that you can navigate at the same time. Why would you want to use this when you can just open a new, full browser window? Because with normal browser windows, you can only have "focus" on one window at a time. Katiesoft enables you to browse multiple panes concurrently, each with its own navigation. If you've ever had to surf several sites at one time and wished you could see them all at the same time and have complete control, this is the tool for you.

The program is very well thought out. Here are some of the features:

• Snapshots - useful if you want to be able to bookmark your custom panes. There are many options here. You can take a snapshot of not only particular site combinations but also the size of the panes and the position of the scrollbar!
• Auto refresh - set your custom panes to refresh the sites at a predetermined interaval.
• Maximize/minimize pane - If you want to expand a pane to get a better look, simply click the maximize button. When you want to return to the multi-paned view, click the minimize button.
• App capture - The free version of Katiesoft only allows you to browse Web sites. However, the upgrade, which runs $29.95, will permit the integration of desktop applications to the mix. That means checking e-mail and running Microsoft Word or any other app. That's one premium upgrade that's probably worth the extra cost.

Rating: 2.5 out of 3 stars

It's clear that even if these kinds of metabrowsing services do not catch on with the general public, this trend does represent a shift of power away from the browser, which has been the dominant tool to use the Internet since the Internet began.