By Robert Castley

Facebook was once again the quickest social networking site this month with an average response time of 0.58 seconds – half a second quicker than Flickr, the next quickest site of those monitored.

Bebo continued to struggle this week and came in tenth place with an average download speed of almost five seconds, more than two seconds slower than Hi5, which was in ninth place.

It’s great to see that the index average is under two seconds this month with only MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo falling below – this really shows these sites what they need to achieve to catch up with their competitors.

All of the sites monitored demonstrated impressive availability scores this month, although none achieved 100%. Twitter was the lowest scoring site on this index with 99.37% availability. While this index measures the availability of the home page, it does not capture loading errors or download delays on other pages. Site visitors still complain about Twitter’s famous “Fail Whale” when the site is over capacity.

Popular social networking sites need to make sure that they are not turning site visitors away due to an influx in the number of visitors. If browsers are regularly turned away from one social networking page in particular, this could be damaging to the site’s reputation which would raise concerns for potential and existing advertisers. All of these sites should be aiming for 100% availability and response times of less than two seconds. That way, they can be sure that they’re not driving away site visitors and potentially lucrative advertising partners.

About the author

Robert Castley has been solutions consultant at Keynote for nearly 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 a global leader in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring. 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.

http://www.keynote.com/