Webware

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.

New York based Neighborhoodies has a cool new tool for people who are all about customization called the "hoodie-o-matic." Like services that let you custom design clothing to sell to others, you can create an entire garment in your browser and see the results in real time as you toggle various options.

The results aren't actually a new service offering. In fact, the previous system would let you do the same thing, although it was a series of drop-down menus, the result of which you'd only see once you received the garment. The new system takes away that element of surprise, and also cuts down on some of the manpower needed to transfer over those design orders for printing.

I had great fun creating the one pictured below, although as you can see from the price tag these designs don't come cheap. Each additional design element costs a little extra on top of the base price, although you can stack on as many as you want.

For now the tool only works with hooded sweatshirts (hence the name), but considering the large volume of t-shirts the company sells, there could be a version for t-shirts or another articles later on down the line.

The Hoodie-o-matic lets you design hoodies with all sorts of custom touches. They don't come cheap though.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Thursday's news about the upcoming 250 GB monthly cap for Comcast data subscribers left some questions unanswered. I shot a few of my own, as well as some from readers over to Comcast to get them answered. These are mostly items that did not appear in both the post about the amendment, or the otherwise comprehensive FAQ page.

Update at 5:05 p.m. PDT: In a bizarre twist, the previous answers to my questions were answered by someone named Bill G., who Comcast says is not an authorized spokesperson for the company, despite answering my e-mail sent through the company's press contacts page. Charlie Douglas, who is Director of Corporate Communications for Comcast's Online & Voice Services, wrote me back to let me know the "correct" answers to these questions. I've highlighted where the previous unofficial answers differed for the sake of continuity, although the only major differentiation from the unofficial contact is the mention of Comcast developing its own bandwidth monitoring and notification service for its customers, which is apparently not happening.

Will there be a usage meter available on Comcast subscriber's online account information?
Douglas: There are numerous free or fee-based meters that are widely available on the Internet to anyone who wants one.
(Editor's note: This differs from our unofficial contact who said "Comcast is developing a meter to track your bandwidth." We've got a write-up of ways to do this using various software tools.)

Will you be offering larger bandwidth packages for home businesses or "excessive users?"
Douglas: Our excessive use policy is only for residential service customers. As of today, this policy does not apply to our commercial services customers.

How does this factor in with users of your Digital Voice service? On average how much bandwidth does that service take up?
Douglas: Comcast Digital Voice is a completely separate service and is not a factor.

We've also had some questions about the bandwidth averages cited on this page. 2-3 GB median monthly bandwidth seems incredibly low, as does the figure for how large an e-mail is (0.05KB/e-mail). Most messages in my inbox hover between 10-50k. Was it a typo for 0.05MB?
Douglas: 2 to 3 GB/month is the median monthly amount used by our residential high-speed Internet customers. The examples we provided at www.comcast.net/networkmanagement are illustrative of how much activity would be required to reach 250GB in a month. More than 99 percent of our customers do not come close to using more than that amount.

Got any other questions you feel are unanswered? Leave them in the comments and we can send out a second round.

Beleaguered online-music pioneer Napster announced to shareholders in a letter Friday that it's still employing investment bank UBS and may be positioning itself for "strategic alternatives" to keeping the company public--i.e. a sale.

The letter was sent on behalf of Napster's board in order to urge shareholders to not vote for three activist candidates for the board. "The press release recently filed by the dissident group appears to imply that your board is not willing to consider a sale of the company," the letter read. "This is not true."

The board additionally recommended that in place of the dissident candidates, shareholders re-elect existing board members Richard Royko, Philip Holthouse, and Robert Rodin.

Napster was the original name in digital music, and a notorious one at that. The free peer-to-peer service was silenced after a high-profile court battle. Its attempts to resurface as a legitimate subscription-based music service just haven't gotten it back on top, and the addition of 6 million DRM-free MP3s would've been more impressive, if Amazon MP3 weren't doing the same.

Napster's letter to shareholders insisted that the proposed new board members would lead the company in a wrong direction. "The dissident group's nominees have no relevant experience in the digital-music industry, have no public-company board experience, and the dissident group has not put forth any substantive plan for how their nominees will enhance value for our stockholders, if elected to the board," the letter read.

Follow that blog!

(Credit: Google)

With blog platforms Movable Type and WordPress adding social-networking features to their software, it was only a matter of time before Google's Blogger did the same.

A post on the official Blogger blog earlier this week announced that users would soon be able to display their "followers"--other Blogger members who have subscribed to them.

The optional feature--along with a notification on blog owners' "dashboards" of how many people have subscribed to their blogs through Blogger--will be rolled out in the next few weeks. A new tab on the dashboard, called "Blogs I'm Following," lets Blogger users keep track of updates to the blogs on their subscription list.

The problem with these sorts of features is that they're inherently limited to readers whose "following" is directly tied to the Blogger software and its members, so it will reflect only a slice of readers. A follower widget (or gadget, as Google calls them) claiming 21 followers only refers to Blogger members, not to the overall number of people reading the blog, which could make the owners of smaller blogs get a bit image-conscious.

But with its Google ownership, Blogger is tying the new following feature into some of its other properties, like Google Reader and the forthcoming Google Friend Connect. The "Blogs I'm Following" tab, for example, can be imported into Google Reader.

My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get euthanized.

(Credit: Yahoo)

File this one under the "ouch" category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.

An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, "Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available."

Mash didn't really offer anything new, other than the fact that instead of inviting friends you created profiles for them and then invited them to customize and change them. You could also add "modules," a sort of rudimentary version of social-network apps. It was designed as a quirky, cute step up from Yahoo 360, the social network that Yahoo had based off its millions of pre-existing user accounts; if Yahoo 360 was analogous to AOL profiles, Mash was more like Facebook.

But Mash never caught on, and its parent company has now deemed it worth closing.

This is not the first time that Yahoo has launched an experimental social network only to yank it. Last year, Yahoo shut down a Dodgeball- or Brightkite-like mobile social site called "Mixd" that had only been in operation for a few months.

Starting October 1 customers of Comcast's residential data services will have an invisible barrier on their monthly data usage. Under the new guidelines of Comcast's Acceptable Use Policy announced Thursday, that cap will be set at 250 gigabytes per month, per account.

Users who go over the limit will get a courtesy call from Comcast's customer service for the first instance. However, under the new policy a second-time offense means the service is immediately suspended for an entire calendar year.

Surprisingly the company is not providing any tools to help users monitor their current usage. An FAQ on Comcast's support site simply suggests that customers do a "Web search" for bandwidth metering software that will track this amount for them. Going forward there may be plans to set up alerts over certain thresholds, or bundle some official tool as part of the company's starter software.

Comcast notes that the median usage for most residential customers falls somewhere between 2GB and 3GB, a number that is regularly broken within a matter of hours and sometimes minutes by customers taking advantage of streaming HD video and online backup services. The company breaks down basic usage numbers similar to what's seen on the marketing materials on a consumer hard drive:

* Send 50 million e-mails (at 0.05KB/e-mail)
* Download 62,500 songs (at 4MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 high-resolution digital photos (at 10MB/photo)

A far greater problem may be the slighting of cloud storage services that offer file transfer and backup. Services like Carbonite and Mozy let you back up and transfer the entirety of your computer's storage several times per month, which on many standard consumer machines can be in the hundreds of gigabytes.

Apple, too, is just at the beginning stages of MobileMe, a service that offers sync and file backup to multiple devices. Additionally, the rumored all-you-can-eat iTunes could drastically change how much downloading users are doing on a monthly basis.

So what do you think about this new limit? Let us know in the comments and the poll below.

The stock tracking and community site Cake Financial is getting some interesting new features, including its first branded financial instrument, an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that rolls up the best stock ideas from the Cake communuty.

Cake CEO Steve Carpenter believes that of the approximately $100 billion that consumers pay for stock management services, "a lot is wasted." He's built a service that identifies the stock picks from the best performing members in his community, and lets other users take advantage of their investing skills. Importantly, Cake doesn't show you just which stocks have done well among its users. That's old information. Rather, Cake identifies the users that are doing well in their portfolios and highlights their transactions, as they happen, for other users. One of the byproducts of that is the Cake Take, a rating service "akin to Morningstar," Carpenter says. But it's more predictive, more timely, and a lot less expensive to run, since it's algorithmic and not based on the opinion of paid analysts. Fair warning: I don't know if the Cake Take's predictions are actually better than MorningStar's. I just think the idea is sound, and more contemporary.

Cake recommendations I'm supposed to be comfortable with.

If you're a Cake member and you link it to your stock trading accounts, it combines information about other members' activities with your own, and in the new "Scout" feature, identifies stocks that are performing better than yours, in users' accounts with similar asset allocation to yours, but that also evidence lower risk. In other words, stocks you'd be comfortable owning and that should make you more money.

Which brings us to Cake's ETF, the Cakedex, which should be available via ETF resellers like iShares in 2009 (Carpenter gave iShares as an example only; he's not revealing the outlets for the Cakedex yet). The Cakedex ETF will be an index fund made up of the top 100 holdings of the top-performing investors on Cake Financial. Details of the fund, such as how the holdings will be apportioned and how often the fund will rebalance, are still forthcoming. But this is a very interesting, efficient, and social financial product.

It's a timely idea, not just for consumers, who could always use better stock advice, but for brokerages. The price of stock trading is moving towards zero (see Zecco, among other trading houses). Online brokerages are now trying to make money by holding customers' assets (offering banking services) and by layering in social networking features that make it harder for customers to leave.

See also: Marketocracy.

Previous coverage: The Financial Wisdom Of The Crowds: Spendview, Cake, Mint.

Digg has always made its message clear: it's not social news, it's democracy.

The company's executive team--founder Kevin Rose, and CEO Jay Adelson--thumbed their noses at the DMCA complaint they received when users "dugg" a crack code for the now-defunct HD DVD technology. They also decided to connect with their users through "town hall" events Webcast live four times a year. So it's perhaps fitting that for the company's third quarterly town hall, Rose and Adelson set up shop in the "Big Tent" new-media hall at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. (Digg is a "Big Tent" sponsor.)

It'll be following up with an event held in partnership with MySpace at the Republican National Convention. The company also kicked off a "Digg Dialogg" event series, in which executives ask users' questions to prominent guests. Adelson, who called it a "perfect alignment of Digg and elections," interviewed House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the inaugural interview, in partnership with CNN's iReport.

"They're your raw questions," Rose said, his characteristic mop-top haircut forsaken in favor of a buzz cut. "They were completely unfiltered."

To be fair, Digg owes a lot to politics--its energetic base of news hounds loves election coverage, and the national elections inevitably pull a lot of traffic to the site.

The questions were largely technical ones that dealt with the minutiae of Digg culture: Adelson said that the "shout" communication system will be tweaked to limit spamming and a private message system is on the way, better technology to flag duplicate stories ("I hate this!" Rose said on the problem with duplicate story submissions) is coming this fall, and Digg is working on a way to let members flag stories as "not safe for work."

Most of Rose and Adelson's answers, which they breezed through more quickly than with previous town halls due to time constraints on the Denver stage, fell into the niche of "good suggestion, and we're working on it."

One question asked if Digg could institute a forum for members. That was a more contentious point for the company executives. "We do want to have forums for our users to communicate and support each other," Adelson said, but added that he's working on matching up the authentication system so that it uses the same credentials as Digg itself rather than an external forum system.

Rose was less enthusiastic. "Everyone has forums and it's always the same crap," he said. "It doesn't necessarily mean that they're helping elevate the good questions and helping the conversation come through."

A few genuinely good ideas came up: one question suggested "geotagging" for stories to group them into local news stories, something that could make the site legitimately compete with sites like Outside.in and city blog networks like Gothamist. "Yes," Rose said. "We've thought about this as well and it would be really cool if we could start to group different events around you." Adelson added that Digg has "a few projects on the way...think 2009, realistically, for some of this stuff."

Despite the somewhat dull nature of many technical questions about recommendation engines and comment improvement, Adelson and Rose insisted that those are the questions they want to hear because it's where Digg users can really make a difference in shaping the site's direction. "It's really important to know what you guys are thinking. It keeps us honest," Adelson said.

The next Digg town hall will be held on November 6--two days after the U.S. presidential election. Its next meetup, however, will be off American shores: Rose will be taping his Diggnation podcast live from London on October 10.

If you've been on the fence about ditching Outlook for Google Apps you might want to give Google's efforts another look. In a blog post this morning the company outlined some of the ways Google Calendar has improved over the past month with a handful of small, but important features. Many of them are aimed squarely at business users.

One of the new improvements, flexible reminders, seems like the most minor--but it's not. Setting up reminders in the previous system had presets on when you'd be able to get the message. The new system is far more customizable and lets you drop in whatever time you want, complete with an option for days, which means you could set a reminder years in advance. You can still set whether you want it as a pop-up, e-mail or SMS message, the last of which I find to be the most useful if your mobile phone doesn't sync up with Google Calendar.

The other major improvement, which is more business-centric is the option to selectively e-mail meeting attendees. Like Outlook you can now get a separate list of people who have replied yes, no, or maybe and e-mail specific groups without perturbing the others. In both the business and social world, this is a great way to send notices and reminders without spamming the in-boxes of people who have already responded.

Alongside these two features is a slight upgrade to the event creation tool which now allows for overlapping events, as well as a new two-click calendar subscription shortcut that lets you subscribe to someone else's calendar without having to deal with special invites or permissions.

One of the updated features is the option to create new draggable calendar events over other ones. Previously you'd have to create it elsewhere then drag it over--making it a two-step process.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)