Doxo

Online social networks, notably Facebook, centralize our virtual interactions with friends and family. Financial management apps, such as Mint.com , act as hubs for personal finance. A new type of app that builds on this same premise of centralization is the online family organizer, a one-stop shop for household management. Among the newcomers in the space is Doxo (free), a website that lets you back-up important family documents, manage household payments, and connect with utility and service providers.

While Doxo is off to a strong start in helping shape what online family organizers will be, it acts a little too much like a filing cabinet and not enough like the matriarchs and patriarchs who have traditionally managed families by keeping important information about people in their heads. It's the people part that's missing. There are no options in Doxo for simply listing the people in the family and associating information or documents to them. So while you can upload your marriage certificate, there's no shared calendar for reminding your spouse of your upcoming anniversary. Connect a healthcare provider's information to your Doxo account, and you can see statements regarding hospital visits, but you can't associate them to, say, your son.

Another such service, AboutOne (beta) (free, 3 stars) has the opposite problem. It's well-thought out in how it handles people, but doesn't support payments and bills. In some sense, it's less useful than Doxo, though, because at least with Doxo you have a reason to log in frequently?to keep an eye on your bills?and therefore you'll use the site more. With AboutOne, I could easily imagine setting up an account, filling in important information, and then forgetting all about it in two or three months. And while I wouldn't classify the family tree and genealogy website Ancestry.com as a family organizer, it does have a lot of the same features, including the ability to record important details about family members and upload family documents, keepsake photos, and more.

When you set up an account in Doxo, it takes several measures to help keep your documents protected. First, every login consists of a username, password, security question, and security image. Each stage of a login occurs on a new screen, too, a tougher system for hackers to crack. And because it was founded by a team who had a background in monetary security, Doxo treats every file you upload to it as it were money. It's very secure.

The site contains some pre-populated sections, particularly for connecting with service providers, but you can create your own folder structures, too. You can name the sections whatever you want to store, for example, copies of your medical history, your last will and testament, or paperwork related to your job. I do wish more suggestions came with the account, though. Seeing how other people use Doxo might have given me more ideas beyond what I could think of by myself on the spot. I'd love to see a list of common folder names or some other suggestion mechanism.

One neat feature in the billing and services area is the ability to set a price-limit on bills that autopay. If a payment exceeds a certain amount, Doxo will alert you and require you to authenticate and approve the bill before it's paid.

Online family organizers are still in their infancy, and while I like where Doxo is heading with its free service, I would like to see it include more areas for storing information about people. Family first.?

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