Webware

Are My Sites Up?, the uptime monitoring service, now has an application for iPhone users that lets them keep an eye on all their domains when they're away from their computer. While the service offers free SMS and e-mail notifications in the event that your site goes MIA, there hasn't been an easy way to add new sites on the go, which this app does in spades.

You can add and edit new sites to keep an eye on, as well as delete them entirely. There is, however, no way to set what kind of notifications you want to get for each domain, which I'm told is coming in a future revision. Another small caveat is that you must subscribe to one of the service's three premium plans to use it, so free users cannot partake.

While this app isn't much to look at just yet, it's one that could be promising with the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 update, which enables push notification in third-party apps. This means you could get real-time notifications when one of your sites is down even when the app isn't running. It would also let you hop straight to the site in question to double check.

Here's a quick demo of what it looks like from creator Chris Coyier:

Comcast has thrown down the bandwidth gauntlet. Starting in October, Comcast broadband users will be restricted to 250GB worth of downloads per month. When asked whether the cable company was planning on offering a bandwidth meter to customers, a Comcast representative stated that it hopes to, eventually, but until then Google would be a nice place to find one.

So, I've come up with a list of free bandwidth monitoring software for Windows and Mac that should tide you over until Verizon brings some Fios action to your hood.

BitMeter offers a Web interface for tracking your traffic through a browser.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

First off, let's look at BitMeter. When running, it lives in your Windows Taskbar, so the features are accessible only through the context menu. Halfway down the lengthy list is the knockout punch: ISP Restrictions. This lets you set a limit that can be based on downloads only, or total traffic. It also offers notification based on the percentage of your quota that has been downloaded, and the start date of the quota.

It's more than a one-hit wonder, offering a live graph of upload and download usage, a usage calculator that can work based on transfer time or file size, and hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly statistics. This data can also be exported and saved. However, BitMeter lacks polish in the interface. The main screen is a live usage graph. All features are hidden in the context menu, so it's not going to win any design contests soon.

BitMeter's ISP Restrictions window.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Despite the promising name, I found Bandwidth Monitor Lite to be a disappointment as far as monthly quotas were concerned. Similar to BitMeter in layout, although the look of its graph is slicker, the actual tools that the Lite version offered were slim. You can track the amount of data downloaded and set a day of the month to start counting, but there was no way to set the quota or configure an alert.

The persistent emphasis on themes and skins was irritating, since the features that they were meant to put on display were less than stellar. The upgrade version does offer a lot more, but paying for a bandwidth tracker strikes me as a bit insulting, since we're already throwing cash at Comcast that we might not have had we known there would be a post-contract download cap.

Two other promising tools that I looked at were Axence NetTools and FreeMeter. Axence was the more advanced one by far, with a well-organized and professional-looking layout, but neither has bandwidth-monitoring capabilities that Comcast users will be looking for. Axence does have a "bandwidth monitor," but it can only check on user-specified connections, not overall up/down traffic.

For Macs users, iStat Menus and MenuMeters both sounded promising. Neither offer the robust bandwidth management tools that this Comcast problem is calling for, though.

I did that find a little-known app called SurplusMeter does precisely what we need it to do. Like BitMeter for Windows, it gives users the ability to set a bandwidth limit, a start day of the month, and the connection type--PPP Modem or Network Card, for example.

SurplusMeter offers Mac users a clean and simple traffic tracker.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

SurplusMeter also calculates a daily allowance, and reconfigures that depending on how much you've actually used for the month. It lacks the not-quite-fancy graphs that I encountered in its PC counterparts, but SurplusMeter also lacked something they had: an alarm or notification that would tell you when you were approaching your limit.

Fortunately, the interface is dead simple. All the options are presented in an uncluttered layout--you'll get exactly what you need from this app with a minimum of hassle. Handy progress bars give a slight visual flair to the days left in the month, the download megabyte count, and the total downloaded and uploaded.

Clearly, there's no killer app for either operating system, but there's at least one for each out there that most users should be able to get by on. It's an imperfect stop-gap to a problem that has the potential for wide-ranging consequences far beyond mere file sharing.

I stumbled upon this really simple one stop service last week and it's something I think a lot of casual media creators will find useful. It's called Traackr, and it lets you keep tabs on what's going on with the media you're sharing on the Web. You can plug in your accounts from several popular services including YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, and Dailymotion, and then have the service track usage for each using handy charts and indicators. Think of it as Google Analytics for Web sites you don't own.

To see how you stack up against others, Traackr compares your daily numbers to others on the service and gives you a buzz and popularity rating out of 100. Each users profile page is simply a place for people to list a little information about themselves. Traackr also does some of the heavy lifting and shows the most recent and most popular content from each service in little widgets below whatever information you've listed. That's about as far as the community portion goes though, there's no way to befriend other Traackr users or send them a private message.

All the content you want to track on Traackr is mashed together, but power users can compare certain groupings of content with others by creating "campaigns." Unlike advertising campaigns these are the equivalent of folders, allowing you to mix things such as videos, music, photos, and blog posts together into single containers. You can then compare campaigns with one another and see which ones are performing the best.

I would love to see something like this make its a way to Google Analytics. For those who haven't used Analytics, it's a wonderful way to dig through a lot of information very quickly. In this case viewing all that information in one spot is far easier than jumping from site to site to check out what people are looking at.

See which of your YouTube videos are doing the best, then stack them up against Flickr photos, blog posts, and other shared Web media.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I wrote about the benefits of using multiple monitors in 2004 (see Secrets to My Excess), and I haven't wavered from my position: If you use a single monitor--unless it's a giant 30-inch model--you are missing out on one of the easiest ways to increase your productivity. Yes, I know this isn't really a Webware story, but the tools I'm about to describe have made using Web apps (all apps, really) much easier for me.

It's dead easy to add a second monitor to either a desktop or a laptop computer. The operating systems handle it natively, and current the hardware does, too: Laptops can push video to an external display and to their built-in LCD at the same time, and almost all new video cards have two outputs.

But what if you want more control than the OS gives you, or if you want to move beyond two monitors? Let's look at a few products that make the multimonitor user's life even better.

The cheapskate's mega-monitor: Two low-cost old displays and a laptop.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

First up: DisplayLink. This is a new technology (and product) that routes a video signal over USB, allowing you to connect more monitors to your computer than you have actual video ports. Samsung actually makes a DisplayLink-enabled monitor, but you can slap any old screen onto your PC using a DisplayLink adaptor like this one from IOGear. I can vouch for the technology on Windows XP. I'm using it now and I love it. I did have problems displaying a high-resolution QuickTime movie on the USB-connected monitor, but everything else, including YouTube videos, has displayed perfectly. DisplayLink is also available for the Mac.

But actually managing apps on three monitors can be a bit of a drag. Literally. There's a lot of real estate to drag windows around on. So on my XP setup, I've been using a free download called DisplayFusion to help out. Although it's primarily pitched as a tool to mange multimonitor wallpapers (which it does well), I like it because it gives me very cool keyboard shortcuts for moving windows around. Ctrl-Windows-X sends the active window to the next monitor, Crtl-Windows-left arrow resizes a window to take up exactly the left half of the monitor it's on, and so forth. I even recommend this tool for unimonitor users, especially those with large displays.

Finally, if you're using a laptop and often switch between traveling mode (using the laptop's own display) and desktop mode (using two or three displays), you might find that keeping your icons where you want them becomes tiresome, as they often jump around when you switch display setups. I use Enterra Icon Keeper, a simple Windows add-on that lets you save icon positions for each setup. When you move from single- to multiple-monitor configurations, you just select "Restore Icon Positions," and it pops everything back to where it was the last time you saved icon positions.

Related: Tom Merritt and I discussed these products on our latest Real Deal Podcast.

On Thursday, Web site-monitoring firm WatchMouse released the results of a study about the performance of 104 social-media sites--social networks, blogging communities, bookmarking sites, and the like--and boldly deemed them to be overall "slow and inaccessible."

WatchMouse used its "Site Performance Index" (SPI) methodology to track the reliability and load time of the sites in question; this figure is computed by calculating the time needed to call up a site's home page and applying a penalty for each failed request. Lower is better: an SPI of 500 is considered good, whereas the Utrecht, Netherlands-based WatchMouse considers over 1,500 to be indicative of "a seriously negative user experience."

According to the study, social networks in general are not particularly reliable: 51 of the 104 sites surveyed came up with SPIs of 1,500 or more, and only six small social networks were awarded with SPIs under 500 (Faceparty, Tagged, ASmallWorld, Flirtomatic, Rummble, and StudiVZ). At the top of WatchMouse's blacklist was Facebook, which it assigned a whopping 6,629 SPI. That was the worst ranking out of any of the sites surveyed--even microblogging service Twitter, whose frequent downtime has become a punchline of sorts. (WatchMouse assigned an SPI of 1,467 to Twitter.)

Facebook has not yet issued a response to the study.

Many of the other poorly-performing social media sites aren't exactly household names, like Searchles (SPI 5,856) and RateItAll (SPI 3,370). Music-based social networks tended to come in with disconcerting indexes, perhaps because of the amount of streaming media hosted on many of them--Last.fm, acquired by CBS Interactive last year, had an SPI of 1,837; the fast-growing Buzznet was assigned an 1,868; and Mog had an index of 1,911.

But according to WatchMouse, many of the highest-profile social networks didn't perform all that badly. MySpace, which had a famous outage in the summer of 2006 when a heat wave crashed its servers, clocked in a rather respectable index of 923. Business network LinkedIn came in with a 1,006. The youth-oriented Bebo achieved a score of 912. And Google's Orkut, third-string in the U.S. but dominant in countries like Brazil and India, had an enviable index of 564.

WatchMouse is only one company, however, and every study's methodology has limitations--just look at the controversy over traffic monitoring statistics. The SPI is based on home page load time and reliability rather than individual pages on a social network--it's monitoring, for example, Myspace.com rather than Myspace.com/whinyemoband. Other performance monitoring firms would likely show different results on a similar study. We've contacted a few for comment.

Another tool has emerged for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers faced with caring for an aging parent or grandparent.

Caring.com, which debuted Monday, offers how-to information on caring for elderly family members, whether they live in their own home, with a family member, or in a facility. The topics include providing in-person and long-distance support, financial and legal advice, and end-of-life issues.

Caring.com features a community area for people to share care-giving tips, as well as a section where questions can be posed to various experts, such as a communication supervisor with the American Medical Response ambulance company.

Tools on the site include a risk calculator to determine the chances an elderly family member will fall and tips on how to prevent falls, said Andy Cohen, co-founder and chief executive, who started the company in January.

"There are a lot of sites that address specific diseases, but no other site is as comprehensive," said Cohen, whose mother died of lung cancer last fall.

Cohen is a former Intuit executive who launched Caring.com with Steve Fram, a former BabyCenter vice president of engineering, and Jim Scott, BabyCenter's former global editor-in-chief. Both Fram, Caring.com's chief information officer, and Scott, the site's editor-in-chief, are dealing with elderly parents who are suffering from health issues.

An estimated 34 million Americans are caring for elderly parents. The National Alliance for Caregiving and the MetLife Mature Market Institute found that 15 percent of caregivers live an hour or more away from the elderly family members, making it harder to track whether they are taking their medication or to keep a watchful eye on them.

Although a number of groups and companies are betting on the future of eldercare technology, the interest of caregivers in receiving information and tips is not lost on venture capitalists.

Caring.com has raised a total of $7 million in funding from Doll Capital Management and Split Rock Partners. A large portion of the funding is earmarked for providing unique content, which is designed to serve as a barrier to entry for competitors, Cohen said.

(Credit: MarkMonitor)

MarkMonitor, a San Francisco-based enterprise brand protection company, on Monday released its latest survey. During June, MarkMonitor tracked more than 100,000 drug-related spam landing sites and found a majority of these practice poor Internet security and may not be selling legitimate brand-name drugs, which could endanger users tempted by the low prices offered.

While that's not earth-shattering news, the report gives concrete statistics surrounding the practice known as "brandjacking," which can encompass a variety of online threats to brand names. In the report, MarkMonitor said sample drugs purchased from these sites tested as either stolen, expired, diluted or alternative forms of known brand-name drugs.

MarkMonitor reports that on a daily basis, more than 6,000 unique sites are responsible for these drug-related spam messages, with more than half of this traffic originating in China and Russia. Of the 3,160 online pharmacies landing sites studied, only four are accredited as Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (VIPPS). One third of the online pharmacies used in the drug-related spam messages generate enough traffic to merit an Alexa ranking.

According to MarkMonitor, a majority of the online pharmacies surveyed, 58 percent, were hosted in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom at 18 percent. More than 50 percent of these sites do not secure customer data, putting consumers? identity information at risk.

To avoid prosecution from registered brand owners, some of these online pharmacies are using a practice called "kiting." Kiting is when a company registers and uses a domain for the ICANN-allowed grace period of five days or less without actually purchasing it. In researching the domain name histories of several pharmacies, MarkMonitor found that a few companies are sharing and kiting the same domain names over and over, more or less cybersquatting for free.

The complete study is available here (PDF).