Facebook may be one of the most popular social networking sites but it’s also the slowest, according to a new study. MySpace, Orkut, Yahoo 360 and Flickr all surpassed Facebook in load time.
Digital Journal –They may be well-known but that doesn’t mean they’re the best. Social networking sites frustrate users with slow load times and high error frequency, a new study from Netherlands found. And the worst culprit of the bunch is Facebook, whose load times and error requests occur six times more frequently than MySpace.
According to WatchMouse, a European website performance monitoring service, Flickr, Twitter, Orkut, Yahoo 360 and StumbleUpon all fared better than Facebook in performance speed. In fact, Facebook placed last out of the 104 sites tested by WatchMouse.
The study ranked each site according to its Site Performance Index (SPI). As a release states, it ranks the 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…Sites with an SPI of 500 perform well, whereas an index of 1,500 or higher is an indication of a seriously negative user experience.”
Facebook scored a dismal 6629 SPI. MySpace came in at 923, LiveJournal at 1,151 and Twitter at 1,467. The fastest-loading social networking site was FaceParty, topping the chart at 303 SPI. See the full results here.
Of the 104 sites tested, 51 scored an SPI of 1,000 or more, which means slow load times for frustrated users. Mark Pors, CTO at WatchMouse, had some harsh words for this segment of Web traffic:
It is interesting to see that popular networking sites turn out to have very bad performance. 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.
This report may not turn off Facebook users, even though broadband surfers are accustomed to speedy load times. But what makes Facebook so popular and intuitive is not its speed but its community. People don’t email each other any more; they Facebook-message or “write on a wall.” While the WatchMouse report should be troubling for Facebook executives and programmers, the public will likely take the news with a grain of salt and continue poking each other…even if it takes a bit longer to do so.
