Social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and Twitter and getting way more popular than before with a significant increase in the number of users who has signed up for Twitter. It seems to be more competitive to enter the “Top 100” listings complied by Twitterholic. In December last year, to be featured in the list, you’d have to achieve at least 8,000 followers and this number is gradually increasing at a slow rate. However, over the past few months, it has boosted from 8,000 to an amazing 30,000 till date. This figure is absolutely insane! Not only that, several celebrities such as Barack Obama, Kevin Rose, Stephen Fry, Lance Armstrong and Britney Spears have their followers count heading north steeply.
Even though it has managed to exceed their targets, but the micro-blogging platform which was launched in March 2006 has left behind a bad record last year. Commonly known for its terrible uptime, it was ranked last as the most number of social network downtime in 2008 by clocking an embarrassing 84 hours according to a recent study done by Pingdom (Web monitoring company). I wonder what went wrong with its servers or probably the folks there didn’t have a backup plan to solve this serious problem. Other social networks have performed pretty well, with Imeem only 3.1, Xanga – 4, MySpace – 4.8, Facebook – 7.2 and LinkedIn – 46.8.
Other key findings:
- Facebook and MySpace, the two “giants” in this test had very little downtime in 2008.
- The single most massive social network incident in 2008 happened to Friendster. The service had a data center outage in November that caused more than 23 hours of downtime in a time span of less than 3 days. If it weren’t for that incident, Friendster would have placed much better in this survey.
- 84% of Twitter’s downtime happened during the first half of 2008. July and onward has seen a big improvement in site availability for Twitter.
- 77% of LiveJournal’s downtime happened in Q4 of 2008. It is too early to say if this is indicative of a trend or if it was a temporary lapse in uptime due to the service’s migration to a new hosting provider.
The study also concludes that the longest continuous outrage was Renunion.com or 9.9 hours. Twitter was placed around in the middle of 2.5 hours and it happened on April 4 last year.
According to the report, Twitter has an overall uptime of 99.04% in 2008 even though it had encountered the most downtimes among the social networks which was being tested. It’s known that a huge number of downtimes came during the first half of 2008. It has managed to improve as according to the bar graph over the months. So what the popular micro-blogging service overtake its competitors in terms of number of downtimes next year? Well, let’s wait and see for Pingdom’s new report in 2010.