Before the remote control, people used to have to get up from the couch to change the television channel.

Someday we may be saying that before ZooLoo, people had to call up new screens to check their Facebook and Twitter accounts and others to scan headlines, weather and stock listings.

The company, which was officially launched this summer, had 21,000 subscribers as of last week, with almost 1,000 of them in the Pittsburgh area. Aaron Baer, ZooLoo's spokesman, said the company was surprised by the response in Pittsburgh because it had not actively marketed itself in the city.

"Pittsburgh is a city were ZooLoo grew virally," he said.

ZooLoo, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Internet company, is sort of the electronic version of the roll-top desk: everything in one place that you can open whenever you need it at www.zooloo.com.

He said early adopters in Pittsburgh put the word out to their friends, which drove the local growth.

"You combine that with the fact that our best age demographic has been 18- to 25-year-olds [college students] and Pittsburgh has so much higher education, and I think we see why Pittsburgh has been so good to us," he said.

One of Pittsburgh's early adopters wasn't a college student. Brenda Jesky runs a day care center out of her Hempfield home and was looking for a site where she could set up a daily blog with photos of the children that parents could log onto at work.

"I came across ZooLoo by Internet searching. I was excited to find it because it provides an awesome opportunity without the financial burden," she said.

She liked the fact that she could start for free and then expand, which she did by buying a domain name from the company for $30 a year.

"I figured this was a good option." Mrs. Jesky said. "It is much easier for the parents of my day care/preschool children to access the Web for updates and not to have to worry about losing their paper or having to make repeated phone calls to find out scheduling and such."

Starting out on ZooLoo is easy. It asks basic profile questions: birthday, hometown, current city, relationship and parental status, your religion, occupation and education. The profile, Mr. Baer said, can be open to only those people who are invited to view it or it can be open to anyone.

The site also asks what widgets to put on your personalized dashboard: news; social networking sites, etc. There are choices for a clock; a calculator, the weather. The links for news sites and blogs list the top five headlines. If you clink on a link it opens a new screen.

ZooLoo in essence takes your favorites or bookmarks and puts them all on one page.

"Instead of having a bunch of different Web sites to update your Twitter and Facebook, you can use ZooLoo," Mr. Baer said. It is the same thing with entertainment on the My Zooloo section, which can link to Hulu and ESPN. Another section of ZooLoo has links to retail sites.

"We do this so we can simplify the online experience," he said.

A free account comes with up to three Web pages to customize for friends, family or the whole world to see. A paid account allows as many pages as you want.

Amy Welling, 23, of Franklin Park, discovered ZooLoo at Kent State University because one of her Chi Omega sorority sisters came from Arizona and worked for the company. Ms. Welling became one of the testers of the site before it was opened to the public in July, "so that gave me a chance to check it out," she said. "You can access so many different things in one place and use it as a common site."

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