Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Exchanging information with your banks used to be a hassle. Keeping track of credit card purchases was often a question of waiting for statements to arrive by mail and then entering data by hand. Today, free tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track all of this information. Thanks to this, you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Sponsor Editor's note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb's Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. Up until April 15, which is the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we'll be looking at how personal finance has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping the online world of personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Mint: Leading the Charge Currently, the two most well-known online tools for personal finance management are arguably Mint and Intuit's Quicken Online . Mint stood out from the pack early on because the company made it extremely easy to keep track of all your expenses. After giving Mint access to your bank and credit card account, the service simply downloads your financial information at regular intervals and organizes it. Mint can even track your 401(k) for you. Mint launched in September 2007 and quickly became the darling of the Web 2.0 world. Unlike most of its desktop-bound competitors, Mint managed to talk to virtually every bank and credit card issuer from day one. In October 2008, Mint came out of beta . Today, the company has more than 1.7 million registered users and sees roughly 700,000 active users every month. In October 2009, the company was signing up 30,000 new users per week. Mint's success didn't go unnoticed by the incumbent market leaders and Intuit acquired Mint in October 2009. In November 2009, Intuit announced that it would begin to phase out Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Microsoft suspended sales of Microsoft Money on June 30, 2009 and doesn't plan to compete in the market anymore . Correction : In December, Microsoft actually announced a plan to enter the personal finance market again with a Mint-like tool it is developing in collaboration with Citi. Beyond Mint While Mint gets most of the mindshare on the web these days, it's by no means the only player in this market. Indeed, the success of Mint has given rise to a plethora of similar tools and legitimizes the efforts of companies that tried to enter this market before Mint. ClearCheckbook.com , for example, launched in May 2006. The company focuses on bringing checkbook management online. A number of other tools are competing more directly with Mint. Wesabe , for example, also focuses on giving users an overview of how they spend their money. Sadly, Wesabe makes downloading your information from your checking and credit card accounts a bit more difficult than Mint. Since acquiring Exepnsr , Strands now also offers its own personal finance tool for setting up and tracking personal budgets and staying on top of your finances. Geezeo - which was founded in 2006, and also looks a lot like Mint, has a very strong focus on budgeting. Most of these tools focus on the U.S. market, but more and more of them are also now available outside of the United States. Kublax , for example, offers a Mint-like service in the U.K. Going Mobile Just like almost every other category of online tools, personal finance tools are also making the move to mobile. Mint and Wesabe , for example, offer both an iPhone app and mobile-optimized websites. Most importantly, all of these services are also able to send out alerts to your phone - either through push alerts on the iPhone or as text messages. Whenever you run the risk of exceeding your credit card limit, for example, these services will send you an alert. Of course, a number of banks have also gotten into this game and now offer their own mobile apps. The Bank of America , Chase Mobile and Wells Fargo apps are currently among the top 10 most downloaded free finance iPhone apps, for example. When it comes to paying your bills, apps like BillMinder and BillTracker make it easy to never forget when a bill is due. What's Next? Over the last few years, the web has clearly transformed the way we use personal finance software. Over the next few months, we will have a closer look at the current generation of personal budgeting and finance tools on the web. We will also analyze the current trends around online finance software. This is the first post in our upcoming series about personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Discuss

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How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance

We've all heard security nerds complain about the vulnerabilities of cloud computing; here's the news they've been waiting for. Black-hat hackers got into an unnamed website hosted on Amazon's servers then proceeded to install an illegal command and control infrastructure. Named America's number one most wanted botnet, Zeus was discovered on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) by security researchers yesterday. Sponsor The Zeus Trojan is a keylogger designed to steal data such as login credentials, account numbers and credit card information. It creates fake HTML forms on banking login pages to allow hackers to steal user data. This particular botnet has been linked to around $100 million in bank fraud in 2009. Although we don't yet have details on exactly how the website in question was hacked, we have learned that the software has been removed from the Amazon cloud. This incident is the first example of malware being found on AWS' infrastructure. As we were warned by black hats in April this year, cloud computing carries certain risks and opportunities for exploitation. Our own Sarah Perez wrote: In another part of the Sensepost presentation, they looked specifically at vulnerabilities of Amazon's Web Services. To start off, they detailed the process involved in setting up a new instance on EC2... While Amazon has provided 47 machine images they built themselves, the remaining 2721 images were build by other EC2 users. Can you really believe that all of these images were built securely? Basically, the template directory is just a big archive of user-generated content. And you know what user-gen content is like... risky . As John Pescatore told the Financial Times , "The security of these cloud-based infrastructure services is like Windows in 1999. It's being widely used and nothing tremendously bad has happened yet. But it's just in early stages of getting exposed to the Internet, and you know bad things are coming." Will hackers continue to employ web services to carry out their schemes in 2010? Twitter, Facebook, Google Apps, and now Amazon Web Services have all been used for evil this year. How can websites, corporations, and end users be smarter about online security to avoid personal and financial loss next year? Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss

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Bank Login-Stealing Botnet Found Hiding in Amazon Cloud

Like us, you've probably just come out of a tryptophan-inspired coma on a relative's couch and are jonesing for some tech news. Unfortunately, the newsmakers are likely in the same position. While we cull the tubes for Internet-related happenings, check out this panoply of sites, apps, curiosities, trends and more. Happy Thanksgiving! Sponsor "Somewhat" Frank Gruber Is Thankful For His New Web Project Our good friend Frank Gruber has been working on Thankfulfor.com , a social gratitude journal. Gruber writes that he and partner Jen Consalvo wanted to create "a forum for expressing gratitude routinely as a foundation for happiness and well-being." Frank and Jen with Sir Richard Branson earlier this year. "People come to the site and post what they are thankful for to their personal journal of thanks. People can also choose to send each Thankfulfor post to their social network on Twitter (each post starts with the #thankfulfor hashtag) extending the good vibes far and wide." During the holiday season, Gruber's hosting a Gratitude Challenge for the remainder of the holiday season to encourage users around the world to spread the love. A great idea from a couple of great people! Helping the Hungry Through YouTube Videos Most of the Americans reading this are probably ridiculously stuffed with turkey and the associated edibles, but the good folks at YouTube recognized our annual gluttony as a great opportunity to help the less fortunate. Using their own homepage and blog as a platform, the site asked users, a.k.a. Video Volunteers , to create videos to promote the hunger-related nonprofit of their choice. along with the organization Feeding America and special curator David Arquette, YouTube has selected three submissions on the site. Here's one we liked: Next week, curator Morgan Freeman will kick off another round of submissions, this time focusing on human rights. Search Traffic Gets Seasonal, Economy Remains Slow Hitwise research director Heather Dougherty writes that year after year, Thanksgiving is the peak day for Internet visits to major retail websites, outstripping Black Friday, the day after Christmas, and other traditional big shopping days. Typically, for search engines, Thanksgiving also marks a peak in user searches for major retailers. However, yearly trends show significant drops in traffic and searches between 2007 and 2008. And, Doughtery writes, "The daily visits to the Retail 500 are down compared to last year leading up to the big holiday weekend." Check out the purple line on this graph; it represents search traffic for major retail brands leading up to the holiday, and it's measurably lower than in previous years: Also, the orange line on this graph shows site traffic stats for the same group of retailers. It, too, shows a decline from traffic in previous years. Take heart, online retailers! Stats for traffic coming from email marketing are actually quite robust. Are email marketers with cleverly presented bargains succeeding in these times of woe and want? This seems to be the case. SocialVibe's Facebook App Aims to Feed Folks in Need SocialVibe is all about helping brands and users create positive social change. In a typical SocialVibe setup, a brand "sponsors" users, who take small actions and engagements to raise money for the charity of their choice. The new SocialVibe Facebook app involves partnerships with multiple brands and allows users to help feed the hungry through the UN World Food Programme. Users create virtual Thanksgiving tables, choose one of three decor themes, pick food items to bring, and and invite friends. By engaging in simple, free brand interactions, users are able to furnish their and their friends' tables with turkeys, mashed potatoes, and all the traditional dishes - and best of all, each food item in the app equates to a specific number of meals the UN World Food Programme will be able to provide to hungry families and individuals. That wraps up this year's Thanksgiving around the web. What new sites, apps, or campaigns did you notice and love this year? Tell us all about them in the comments! Discuss

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The ReadWriteWeb Thanksgiving Day Parade

Late last night, AOL revealed a sneak peek at their new branding campaign for their soon-to-be standalone content-focused business. The rebranding effort will officially launch on December 10th when AOL begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company from Time Warner, its current owner. The new logos - yes, there are more than one - feature a lowercase "aol" on top of various colorful images that range from an orange goldfish to a green scribble. The odd designs are definitely different than AOL's "running man" or "triangle with swoosh" logos of years past - logos that became synonymous with the service that a large part of America once used to go online. But are the new logos any good? Or do they look more like the joke that AOL hopes it's not becoming? Sponsor In order for AOL to survive, they've had to focus on becoming a content business instead of an internet provider and that's exactly what the new branding is designed to reflect. Gone are the all-capital letters ("AOL") which remind people of what they stand for ("American Online"). Now, there's an uppercase "A" followed by lowercase letters and a period. This is meant to remind people that "there's always something behind AOL," says CEO Tim Armstrong in an interview with PaidContent . "The AOL brand is composed of many different things. The nomenclature of the dot is what comes after the dot." In other words, AOL no longer stands alone. It's Aol.music, Aol.Mapquest, Aol.Shopping, etc. The new logos are just a preview of AOL's revamped look and are meant to replace AOL's swoosh triangle for good. The AOL "running man," however, will stick around the brand in some form, although the company isn't saying exactly where he will show up. But the updated logos are a little off-putting to some. Noted technology blogger Om Malik of GigaOM posted his gut reaction Sunday night, calling them out as "lame," "ambiguous at best," and "as sexy as the obese, shapeless humans living on Axiom, the flagship of the BnL fleet in Pixar movie WALL-E." Ouch! But it's easy to see where he's coming from. After all, some of the logos look more like the sorts of doodles you would find gracing high-schoolers' notebooks - like the hand doing the " sign of the horns" hand gesture . Really. "Rock on!," shouts the logo, but it reminds us more of a middle-aged heavy metal fan reminiscing about their youth than the young, hip company AOL desperately hopes to become. Then there is the pink glob. The best way to describe this logo is a fluffy wad of bubble gum. A green scribble looks like someone had trouble getting their ballpoint ink pen going and a generic blue swirl seems to signify nothing but a lack of imagination. What content sites are these logos even associated with? Your guess is as good as ours. CNET calls the goldfish logo "cute" (sarcastically?), but AOL isn't trying to build the next LOLcats empire , so maybe they should have forgone "cute" for something a little more meaningful and modern. But that's just our opinion. What's yours? Let us know in the poll below. What do you think of AOL's new branding? ( survey ) Discuss

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Love it or Loathe It? AOL Reveals New Branding (POLL)