bandwidth

Facebook might not be a photo-sharing site, per se, but there are a heck of a lot of pictures uploaded to it.

On Tuesday night, engineer Doug Beaver wrote a blog post announcing that the total count of photos on the site now stands at about 10 billion. The social network announced informally in August that it has hit 100 million active users worldwide.

To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion … Read more

Dara O'Rourke from Good Guide chats with Brian Cooley about how to determine what products are good and good for you.

Watch the show on CNET TV.

Things we Crave

Unicycle-riding girlbot

SmartParts Wi-Fi picture frame

First Look

T-Mobile G1

Free Download of the week

IOBit Smart Defrag

Insider Secret

Track your bandwidth usage

Best of the Web

Five great Web 2.0 products

Your calls

YouTube Downloader will download and convert YouTube videos for you. Particularly for the Zune, is an IE plugin called Zunemytube.

Maximize DVD ripping by making a bit-for-bit copy of the DVD.

If Comcast's October 1 start date for their bandwidth cap has you rushing to fire up your torrent client, take a listen to today's CNET's Real Deal podcast. CNET TV Editor Tom Merritt, Webware Editor Rafe Needleman, and I discuss what the bandwidth cap means (hint: it's not a hat), why it's happening now, and what you can do to keep track of your data usage.

If you're interested in the programs we talk about, they can be found in this blog post from last month.

In the 1980s, New York City undertook a huge project to begin metering residential water service and charging for individual apartment and condo water use rather than simply assessing a flat fee as had been the norm. It was as huge and contentious a project as one would imagine. Why go to all this trouble and expense?

Well, you hardly have to be a radical free market economic thinker to accept that there's generally a connection between how much something costs and how much people consume. The higher the price, the less you use. In this case, the incentives … Read more

It's an all-call show as we gave away a free BlackBerry Curve. On eof the perks of watching the live version of the show every Thursday at 4 PM Eastern. However there's still lots of good info for the podcast and on-demand viewers. Here are the notes.

Watch the show on CNET TV.

Things we Crave

Plastic Logic eReader

Stealth helicopter camera

First Look

iPod Touch 2nd Gen.

Free Download of the week

BitMeter

Quick Tip

Speed up your Wi-Fi

Best of the Web

FotoNauts

Your calls

A few more ways to sync your iTunes across several computers, … Read more

SurplusMeter does precisely what we need it to: it watches your bandwidth traffic, keeping an eye on it like an eagle watching her brood. SurplusMeter gives users the capability to set a bandwidth limit, a start day of the month, and the connection type--PPP Modem or Network Card, for example.

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 many of its PC counterparts sport, but SurplusMeter also lacks something they have: an alarm or notification that would tell you when you were … Read more

It's not going to win any design awards, but this handy program for monitoring your PC's bandwidth usage offers a nice set of features. BitMeter is easy to follow, and stars a floating graph with simple text displays for real-time downloads and uploads. You can customize the display's color and transparency.

Considering its small size, BitMeter provides an impressive amount of options and information. You can view summaries of network activity with hourly, daily, and monthly breakdowns, or receive audio notifications that can be set by transfer size and direction. The built-in calculator is useful for computing … Read more

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.

First off, let's look at BitMeter. When running, it … Read more