New Irish online service targets a real (but sensitive) need.

Had an email from Vinny Glennon on Monday asking me to have a look at his new online service. Those of you who keep an eye on the Irish online service scene will know that he is the developer behind the "mapping for dummies" site - www.useamap.com.

His new offering is aimed at an audience who use a lot of online services (hence multiple username and passwords) and who either travel a lot or at least use multiple computers.

It is called Using Daily - www.usingdaily.com and it is an encrypted service that stores your online usernames and passwords and allows you to access them from anywhere.

This is V1 of the beta and I know that Vinnie will be making changes soon to the service - however these are my comments on it as it stands.

The home page does explain what the service does - however a key requirement for this service is very explicit statements on security, encryption (covered on the page) and privacy. I use a large variety of online services - however I would only entrust the most basic of log-in details to an externally hosted site. The key ones around banking and email are very sensitive and I would need a lot of verification to trust them to anyone online.

The Amazon S3 service covers it nicely - your data is encrypted before it leaves your computer and cannot be accessed by them at all. So loosing your key = loosing your data.

The service also needs to use the https convention when logging in.

When you sign in you see this screen - Vinny has nicely allowed you to be able to access the service while working in normal browsing mode. I found this a little too subtle initially and would suggest that the very first log-in makes the "View Your Links" (top right hand corner) more explicit - or by default shows them.

When you do click on that link you are shown your stored usernames and passwords - so that where ever you are you can access these.

Competitors in this space include www.just1key.com/. They give a lot of reassuring detail about your data and how it is protected. They also point out that they can be accessed from mobile devices. Others are less reassuring - www.passwordsafe.com and www.agatrac.com for example.

Vinnie has once again hit on a service that is required although this time around he is up against some fundamental challenges on the technical and marketing side of things. He has gone through a steep learning curve with Useamap and is very responsive to user feedback - he will crack this one :-)

keith

Comments

[Dave Davis]

Great idea for a site. Glad to see that you chose the WP theme that I designed too!