AOL AND THE MONEY

A couple days ago, Joy found out her sister has been paying $40 a month for AOL’s dial-up service. What a rip-off. She already has a high-speed Internet connection, and has had it for 15 years. Yet the charges went on and on. And this is just the tip of the payout iceberg. According to the latest AOL quarterly report, payments for dial-up services accounted for 70 percent of AOL’s profit.

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THAT’S AWESOME

If you surf the web with Google Chrome, you may notice that typing the first few letters of a website you’ve recently visited brings up the rest. Now Mozilla’s Firefox does the same thing. They call it the “Awesome Bar.”

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PUT IT IN YOUR POCKET

We often use “Pocket” to save articles we want to read later. Pocket software is free for Windows and now there’s a Mac version.

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FREE PROGRAM BUILDS PHOTO WEBSITES

Zapd is a free iPhone app for creating websites. It’s as easy to build a site as tapping your finger and may be a good way to post photos and thoughts. First you choose one of 45 themes. We thought they looked great. Then add photos or snap a few. Tweak your photos with filters and editing tools. Invite someone to collaborate with you if they have photos you’d like on the site. Your site address will have “zapd” in it, as in JohnDoe.zapd.com and can be viewed on a computer, tablet or smartphone. The websites can be private or public. It’s easier than blogging, but similar to “Tumblr,” which has 6.8 million activeU.S.users, the same as Twitter

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ONLINE STORAGE

Google Drive is expected to launch next week with five gigabytes of free online storage. And there are scores of others. There are so many free services for storing your documents and files online that it’s easy to overlook what appears to be the best, which is Microsoft’s SkyDrive. The software giant offers five times as much free storage as any of the others. Oddly enough, it seldom gets any mention in the tech blogs. Is there any reason for this? We’re open to conspiracy theories. The Wall Street Journal recently compared Apple’s iCloud, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft SkyDrive. SkyDrive offered 25 gigabytes of free storage, the others only 5 gigabytes. All of them provide extra storage [...]

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BEAUCOUP AT ROKU

When our AT&T digital video recorder failed again to give us a list of recorded shows, we turned to the Internet. This doesn’t always work, since the Internet doesn’t have everything, but it did have recordings from the Book TV channel and that’s what Joy was looking for.

Which shows to go ya, as some people say, there’s more than one way

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THE NUMBERS REPORT

Internet Explorer usage dropped to under 50%, because of heavy competition from Firefox, Chrome and Safari. On mobile devices, it’s even less popular: 62 percent use something else. On desktops, it’s about half of all browsing use. A couple years ago it was 90 percent.

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NUMBERS REPORT

Facebook now has about 800 million users, which is slightly more than the whole Internet had in 2004, according to InternetWorldStats.com. The Internet now has over 1.7 billion users.

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THE NUMBERS REPORT

Four and a half million pages are added to the web every month. That’s now; there were already one trillion being indexed by Google in 2008. The oldest registered web site is Symbolics.com, posted in 1985. It’s still active, but contains no useful information. Among the ten oldest web sites are Hewlett Packard, Xerox and Northrop Grumman Aviation.

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IS CABLE FASTER THAN DSL?

When it comes to high-speed Internet service, is cable faster than DSL?

That’s like asking which is faster, a Honda or a Toyota. Either DSL or cable might be faster, depending on what you’re service you’re paying for and how the company happens to be running its network in your area.

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