By Robert Castley

The overall average response time for the social media sites monitored this month was 2.46 seconds, with six sites achieving load speeds of under two seconds. Bebo, Twitter and Hi5 struggled with response times all taking more than four seconds to load on average throughout November. Bebo was almost five seconds slower than Facebook with a time of 5.30 seconds compared to Facebook’s 0.65 seconds.

MySpace’s average success rate of only 26.53%, however this is due to MySpace no longer being supported by IE7. People trying to access the site using this browser were taken to a browser unsupported page and were encouraged to download an alternative browser in order to get onto MySpace. While MySpace’s popularity has decreased in recent years, it’s surprising that it is no longer supported by a popular and widely used browser. Hi5 also had issues with a success rate of 91.37%. Facebook was the top performer in terms of availability with a score of 99.93% for the month – YouTube, Flickr, Friends Reunited, LinkedIn, WAYN, Bebo and Twitter all scored above 99%.

With the holiday season approaching, it will be interesting to see how the social networks cope with the inevitable increased in traffic on the sites as people have more time off work and use social networking sites to contact friends online.

About the author

Robert Castley has been solutions consultant at Keynote for over two years. Prior to working at Keynote, Robert worked as a Professional Services Consultant at a document management company, Macro 4, where he worked on developing custom web interfaces. Robert is passionate about web performance and optimisation and has over 10 years of web development experience. One of his proudest achievements is developing one of the world’s most popular Open Source Content Management Systems to the masses – Mambo, which now lives on as Joomla! Robert has a BTEC National Diploma in Computer Studies.

About the company

Keynote Systems is the global leader in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring. It provides companies with solutions for continuously improving the online experience. Founded in 1995, Keynote provides testing, monitoring and measurement products and services for any enterprise including online portals, e-commerce sites, B2B sites, mobile operators and mobile infrastructure providers. Keynote products and services help companies improve customer experience in four areas: Web performance, mobile quality, streaming and real user experience testing.