By Robert Castley

The download speeds and availability for the social networking sites monitored this month continued to be fairly impressive. The index average for load times was 2.13 seconds with only three sites falling below – Hi5, Twitter and Bebo. The overall average availability was 99.74% with LinkedIn and YouTube at the top with a success rate of 99.97%.

The world of social networking has had a bit of a shakeup recently with the sale of MySpace and the announcement of the launch of Google+. It will be interesting to watch what happens to the other sites monitored as they are likely to look to offer more features as a means of enticing their users to stay, rather than venturing to try the new sites.

Websites that embed features using flash content to make their site more appealing often have difficulties when content fails to load properly, which can cause other features on the site to slow down, or not appear at all. As a result, flash content can actually have an adverse effect by driving frustrated visitors away from the site. While sites such as Facebook have continued to successfully integrate more and more features of this type into their offering, it remains to be seen what will come next as social networking companies step up in the inevitable fight against Google+.

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 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.