Web's Growth Shows No Sign of Pause

She's a giant 'bandwidth guzzler': Paul Farhi

(NEWSER) - Siri is knowledgeable, convenient, even funny—but she has a dark side. "Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1," writes Paul Farhi in the Washington Post . Indeed, the iPhone 4S, which brought us Siri, uses twice the data of the regular iPhone 4, and almost three times that of the 3G, a study found, saying the Siri-equipped 4S "appears to unleash data consumption behaviors that have no precedent.” More»

Average users has 130 friends, spends 55 minutes a day

(NEWSER) - Facebook's runaway growth is well documented, but some details still wow, and some are quite odd. Website Monitoring takes a look at the salient facts.

• Popularity: The US has the most active users, but 70% of Facebookers are international. Sure, the UK comes in at No. 2, but No. 3 is...Indonesia? Turkey grabs the No. 4 spot, just ahead of France.

Company may have to revamp how it bills customers

(NEWSER) - AT&T says it's working on ways to keep some iPhone customers from hogging everybody else's bandwidth. It will unveil a series of "incentives" early next year, which could include charging customers based on how much data they use rather than offering an "unlimited" plan, reports the Wall Street Journal . "We're aware of the issue," said a company official, who added that the majority of iPhone customers would not be affected. More»

(NEWSER) - The US military is considering restrictions on access to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, citing privacy and security concerns, the Military Times reports. “Sometimes people, because of the nature of these sites, can have a tendency to get lax in what they put on there,” a Pentagon spokesman says. On the table are everything from shuttering access on government computers to setting up a separate “private” net. More»

Firm tests usage limits in Reno

(NEWSER) - AT&T is capping users’ Internet bandwidth in Reno as an experiment, suggesting that the practice of limiting usage may soon become widespread, Wired reports. Depending on the service plan, new broadband customers will be held to 20 to 150 gigabytes of usage monthly. Current customers will soon face limits if they break 150 GB, with a dollar charged per extra gig. More»