Facebook Tops the Slowest Social Networks
Posted by Nick O'Neill on January 10th, 2008 4:01 PMWatchmouse released a report earlier today listing the overall performance of the top social networks on the web. Among the top ranked sites were Orkut, MeetUp, Tagged.com, Jaiku and Pownce. Unfortunately Facebook ranked as the absolute worst performance among all social networks. I’m not quite sure what standards were used for this test but this is definitely something that Facebook shouldn’t be aiming to be the worst at.
As Caroline McCarthy points out, somehow Twitter managed to perform well overall despite the massive amount of downtime attributed to the site. I’m a little bit skeptical of the standards used. According to the Watchmouse article, the measurement is generated based on how fast the homepage loads and a penalty is assigned for each failed request. It appears as though there were too many failed requests during the trials.
Have you been experiencing much downtime on Facebook? I know that I have been experiencing an increasing amount but it is nowhere near the level that Myspace experienced during their site’s hay-day. The poor performance may have to do with the fact that the test is conducted by a number of computers worldwide. This report mentions nothing of domestic versus international performance. Whatever the case, this is definitely a horrible showing by Facebook.
(4.64 out of 5)
(4.22 out of 5)
January 10th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
WOW … look at the graph, without the penalty, Facebook would kill every other social network. This isn’t news my friend, but a smear campaign.
January 10th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Where is myspace on this list? It’s still the biggest one, and it’s by far the biggest one in the US. Strange that they wouldn’t include it in this chart…
January 10th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
WOW … look at the graph, without the penalty, Facebook would kill every other social network. This isn’t news my friend, but a smear campaign.
January 10th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Where is myspace on this list? It’s still the biggest one, and it’s by far the biggest one in the US. Strange that they wouldn’t include it in this chart…
January 10th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
That is an extraordinarily random selection of websites!
January 10th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
@FacebookRules. The image is the bottom crop. There are many others on the list. There is something very strange, however for the 10 second penalty they’re assigning for the site outage
@Charlie: The graph is not the entire graph. MySpace is a third of the way from the top on the chart.
Here is the entire graph: http://www.watchmouse.com/en/SPI/2008/performan...
Remember, this is only measuring the homepage (not logged in) speed.
January 10th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
That is an extraordinarily random selection of websites!
January 10th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
@FacebookRules. The image is the bottom crop. There are many others on the list. There is something very strange, however for the 10 second penalty they’re assigning for the site outage
@Charlie: The graph is not the entire graph. MySpace is a third of the way from the top on the chart.
Here is the entire graph: http://www.watchmouse.com/en/SPI/2008/performance_social_networking_sites.php
Remember, this is only measuring the homepage (not logged in) speed.
January 11th, 2008 at 1:03 am
This is absolute bullshit. Who cares how fast the “main page” loads? Most FB “errors” are are reported the bottom of the page, and don’t affect the use of the page. As far as application page time outs, well.. that’s the cost of open access and letting anyone set up an app and get traffic quickly.
They don’t say when they ran the test, but since they needed a good title story, they probably chose the moment after a FB code push.
January 11th, 2008 at 2:03 am
This is absolute bullshit. Who cares how fast the “main page” loads? Most FB “errors” are are reported the bottom of the page, and don’t affect the use of the page. As far as application page time outs, well.. that’s the cost of open access and letting anyone set up an app and get traffic quickly.
They don’t say when they ran the test, but since they needed a good title story, they probably chose the moment after a FB code push.
January 16th, 2008 at 10:31 am
[...] and most of them have taken place at night. Occasionally, Facebook has had minor glitches and as a recent report found, Facebook has surprisingly poor performance on a regular basis. Still though, I haven’t [...]