Mediaboss Marketing

Keynote Systems, the expert in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring, monitors the top 10 UK social networking sites on a monthly basis and analyses how these sites perform compared to their competitors. By Robert Castley.

The performance of the social networking sites monitored this month slipped, both in terms of availability and speed, when compared to January. Friends Reunited, Hi5 and Bebo all failed to load in less than two seconds, with Bebo bringing the average right down with an average response time of 16.34 seconds for February. Facebook continued to be the fastest site to load by almost half a second, with an average time of 0.69 seconds.

Bebo also struggled with availability this month, with an average success rate of 94.67%. However Hi5 was the poorest performing site in February, with a success rate of only 81.47%. This means that almost 20% of people trying to access the site this month were met with loading issues.

The new social networking site, Pinterest, has been hitting the headlines a lot this month. Experts are claiming that sign-up for this site has been far faster than for Twitter and Facebook in the first year. This demonstrates that there is still a considerable appetite for new social networking sites, and so its clear that existing sites need to up their game when it comes to performance in order to compete with new sites.

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 worlds most popular Open Source Content Management Systems to the masses Mambo, which now lives on as Joomla!

About the company

Keynote Systems is a 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.

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Performance of social networking sites – Index from Keynote Systems for February 2012