Today, there are so many social network services such as MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Bebo, hi5, Multiply, Yahoo! 360°, orkut (owned by Google), Windows Live Space, and so on. A social network service focuses on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, and which necessitates the use of software. Most services are primarily web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.
The main types of social networking services are those which contain directories of some categories (such as former classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and recommender systems linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace, Bebo and Facebook being the most widely used in the anglosphere (North America, England, and so on), Google’s Orkut, third-string in the U.S. but dominant in countries like Brazil and India, and Friendster being the most widely used in Asia.

Facebook might be the most immensely popular social networking service today. However, recent research from WatchMouse — the website monitoring company — towards 104 social networking sites has shown that Facebook was the worst performer; recording a slow load time and more errors than any other monitored site. The research has shown that Web 2.0 sites of social networking services often are slow to open or fail to load properly.

"It is interesting to see that popular networking sites turn out to have very bad performance," said Mark Pors, CTO at Watchmouse. "It is surprising they still have such a big fan base when they serve their users so badly. Using Ajax technology, they should be able to work more effectively. For now the sites will need to do a lot of work to remain popular and improve their performance."

WatchMouse used its "Site Performance Index" (SPI) methodology to track the reliability and load time of the sites and computed by calculating the time needed to call up a site’s home page and applying a penalty for each failed request. Lower is better: an SPI of 500 is considered good, whereas WatchMouse considers over 1,500 to be indicative of "a seriously negative user experience."

Of the 104 sites monitored, 51 show a Site Performance Index (SPI) of 1000 or more, making them very slow in load time. Faceparty performed the best — with an SPI of 303 — meaning users can access the site most frequently and in the fastest time. While Facebook has an SPI of 6629, MySpace has an SPI of 923, Friendster has an SPI of 1153, and Windows Live Space has an SPI of 1386.

Facebook has not yet issued a response to the research. However, the result of WatchMouse research would not impact to Facebook. Its strong immensely communities make Facebook popular and not based on loading time.

This is the chart, listing some popular sites which monitored by WatchMouse (lesser is better):

www.watchmouse.com

Social Networking Sites SPI

The WatchMouse Site Performance Index (SPI) quantifies the user perception of speed and availability of a site in a single number.

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing all the sites monitored, can be found on WatchMouse.

Definition of WatchMouse Site Performance Index (SPI)

The WatchMouse Site Performance Index (SPI) quantifies the user perception of speed and availability of a site in a single number. The SPI is computed by adding up the time needed to load the main page, adding a penalty for each failed request. The higher the number, the lower the customer experience of the site. Sites with an SPI of 500 perform well, whereas an index of 1500 or higher is an indication of a seriously negative user experience.

The WatchMouse Site Performance Index was developed by Dr Peter van Eijk and his team, based on many years of practical experience and research into the performance and availability of computer systems. The current version of the SPI is computed as follows.