If you’re a dial-up user looking at the low-cost broadband plans, be very sure to read the fine print on additional costs and download limits.

Here’s the perfect reason why: I am currently upgrading a piece of software I use, via download from the USA. It’s Ulead’s Movie Factory 6 Plus software — used to create home DVDs etc.

Downloading online makes more sense to me than waiting a few weeks for a physical shipment to arrive (along with the extra shipping costs). Within an hour, on 1.5Mb/sec broadband, I’ll have the files.

There are two files I’m downloading, of pretty large size:

• Main file is 537Mb
• “Bonus” content file is 352Mb

That’s a total of 889Mb!

That’s fine by me — I’ve got 60Gb (60,000Mb) per month of data allowance.

However, some of the entry level broadband plans available only have a paltry 200Mb of data allowance before you pay EXTRA money for your downloads.

So, this SINGLE file on a SINGLE day of the month would exceed the whole month’s data limit by 689Mb. Let alone all the other activity I do in the month (or even today).

Some low-level plans make you pay $0.15 per Mb over your limit. Makes it sound pretty small, eh?

However, $0.15 x 689 = $103.35!

That’s more than DOUBLE the cost of this piece of software — just to download it! And it’s more than three times the $30 or so you pay for such a plan.

Whilst it’s not a very usual purchase, and is more than I normally download, a low-level plan would either burn a hole in my wallet or mean I can’t take advantage of a convenience such as an online download of a purchased product.

Buyer beware! Before you chose an inexpensive sounding broadband plan, read the fine print, and talk to your friends and family first about “real life” internet usage.

The answer is a social community website: Facebook (f8 for short).

F8 gets more than 50% of its users on the site DAILY. It’s active userbase (logged in during past 30 days) is growing towards an estimated 50 million by the end of this year. In late May 2007, f8 had 24 million users — of which 12 million logged in to f8 EVERY day.

Facebook was described by Ed Dale as “MySpace for grownups” and as I get into f8, I can see why.

F8 “apps” mean that the way in which you can connect, interact, network, broadcast and communicate via f8 are hugely powerful. Applications enable anyone to build social applications to develop or support their online f8 network/community. The ways in which f8 can be tailored to a user’s own needs helps it go well beyond something like MySpace.

It’s no wonder F8 is currently valued at US$15 billion, based on recent investments on companies like Microsoft, who put in US$240 million for a tiny stake in the company.

PS: Here’s my f8 profile.

Sunday, 7:44pm: on another blog of mine, I wrote about the file extension “mgmf” in an article titled “What Kind Of File Is That?” — as .mgmf files were something I hadn’t come across before (they’re a file used in the mind mapping software MindGenius).

Monday, 8:48pm: a user in the UK, searching for “mgmf file” visits my site to see this article.

Twenty five hours and four minutes after it was posted, traffic was already arriving.

As I have stats software, I was able to look on the Google UK site to see where my site was in the results.

A PDF file was number one and I was number two — so in effect, I was the number one website on UK Google within just one day.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t use this blog to “monetise” my traffic — although this result here shows how Google treats fresh information in a blog, and how it can provide you with traffic literally a day later.

I even ranked ABOVE the site of the manufacturer of the software, other than for a single PDF document on their site.

Worth keeping in mind as part of your online traffic strategy!

Here’s the screenshot I took so you can see the top of the results:

UPDATE

Within another 8 hours, we were number one in the results on US Google for “mgmf file extension”… and had traffic that way too!

UPDATE 2

It’s happened AGAIN. On 29th August, I posted an entry about the TinyURL service — and had a visitor to the site on 1st September, typing in “tinyurl get destination” go Google in the US — I was number one in the results on US Google out of 156,000 results.

Ranked below me on the page are much more well-known sites such as 37Signals, New York Times (blog), Perl.org, Podcast Directory and Spamcop.net.

Alrighty, I’m getting into understanding more of the web apps and “things” that are growing more and more popular.

Twitter (I’m DeanDidThis). MySpace. Social Bookmarking (Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon). Google’s apps like Notebook. More SEO stuff within Firefox. BlogLines vs Google Reader. Stuff I’ve seen arrive in the online world, but I’ve relatively ignored. Let’s see what it all does!

(Thanks to Ed Dale’s blog and Twitter Tools for the twitter WordPress integration.)

Will it improve my life, add to my productivity? I have an insatiable appetite for information on a dozen or more topics. Hopefully this will be a filter to be more productive.

Mobile/cell phones — to me, they’re NOT productive. They’re invasive. I got rid of mine (okay, it’s hiding in the desk drawer on a $5/month plan). The only convenience it has to me is when I’m out and may need to call Mel or car breakdown service etc. Not to have it switched on at any other time. Or to SMS (no tweets via SMS!). Or for business (landlines and email cover that, thanks). I’ll never use one in the bathroom/toilet. Or on a train, or in a restaurant. And, unlike the two zombies walking out of their movie session last week, I won’t bowl over unsuspecting passers-by because my head is buried in SMS messaging.

Let’s hope the 2.0 apps and things aren’t slave-drivers like cell/mobile phones are!