Social networking sites fail users

Stephen Withers
Friday, 11 January 2008 08:00

Your IT - Home IT

Almost half of the popular networking sites have "very slow" page load times, according to monitoring company WatchMouse.

51 of the 104 sites monitored by the company were rated as very slow, including big names such as Facebook (the worst), Twitter, last.fm, Windows Live Spaces, Friendster and del.icio.us.

"It is interesting to see that popular networking sites turn out to have very bad performance,” said WatchMouse CTO Mark Pors.

"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."

AJAX allows the server and browser to exchange small amounts of data instead of reloading entire pages each time the content is refreshed.

While the best performing site on WatchMouse's list was Faceparty, it isn't a matter of relatively obscure sites doing well and the big names doing badly. Among the better performers were Orkut, Yahoo! 360, and Friends Reunited, while reading from the bottom of the rankings, Facebook was followed by Searchles, WebBiographies and RateItAll.

Facebook's low score was caused mainly by penalties added to the score when pages took longer than eight seconds to download, or when errors occurred. Even if those penalties were removed, Facebook would still have been in the "very slow" category.