Social networking sites slow and inaccessible; WatchMouse research shows Facebook performance poorest of all
AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands & NEW YORK--(Business Wire)--Popular social networking sites are frustrating users, according
to WatchMouse - by making them wait. Research from the leading website
monitoring company has shown that Web 2.0 sites often lag behind other
commercial sites in performance - they are often slow to open or fail
to load properly. WatchMouse monitored the time it took the social
networking sites listed on Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites), to
load. The results showed that the worst, in terms of availability, was
the immensely popular Facebook.
Other well-known culprits included Twitter, last.fm, Windows Live
Spaces, Friendster and del.icio.us. Of the 104 sites monitored, nearly
half - 51 earned a Site Performance Index (SPI) of 1000 or more, which
indicates very slow load time. This was an unexpected outcome,
considering most of these sites rely heavily on Ajax, which generally
delivers quicker load times because the dynamics of the site do not
load immediately. While first generation websites generally required a
webpage to fully load each time a user clicked, the use of Ajax helps
websites improve interactivity, speed, functionality and usability by
instead exchanging small amounts of data with the server upon user
action.
Faceparty performed the best - with an SPI of 303 - indicating
that users can access the site most frequently and in the fastest time
among the monitored social networking sites. Looking at the results,
most sites still have a lot to work on if they want their users to
keep coming back. Research has shown that most web users are very
impatient and will wait no longer than four seconds for a webpage to
load.
"It is interesting to see that some of the most popular networking
sites turn out to be some of the worst performers," said Mark Pors,
CTO at WatchMouse. "It's surprising that they have gathered such a big
fan base when they serve their users so badly. Using Ajax technology,
they should be able to work more effectively. I believe these sites
will need to do a lot of work to improve their performance if they are
to remain popular."
A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse
Site Availability Index, listing all the sites monitored, can be found
on www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_social_networking_sites.php
About WatchMouse
Companies can easily monitor the performance of their web sites
using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has thousands of
customers in over 70 countries and checks from 25+ locations and
networks worldwide (see: www.watchmouse.com).
WatchMouse
Mark Pors, +31302522400
mark@watchmouse.com
Copyright Business Wire 2008
