The team at Pingdom, a firm that focuses primarily on uptime and performance, has posted a new blog entry estimating that Facebook will overtake MySpace as the top social network in the U.S. within a month or two. That's largely because, according to the same numbers, Facebook has doubled in size in the past year.
Several months ago, traffic firm ComScore noted that Facebook--a year ago far smaller than the News Corp.-owned MySpace--was starting to pass its rival in worldwide traffic. But in the U.S., which still has the big ad dollars, MySpace remained bigger.
There's something to note, though: Pingdom used Google Trends to make its assessment. Google Trends traffic data is one of only many sources of statistics out there, and it's collected primarily from people who have installed the Google toolbar. Numbers from Compete.com, for example, show that MySpace is still ahead.
Even according to Pingdom's numbers, MySpace doesn't appear to be shrinking. The performance firm thinks that could be due to a number of factors: that MySpace is continuing to recruit new users to replace those who may have left for Facebook, that people are using both social networks, or that Facebook is recruiting members who haven't been prior users of either site.
Performance-monitoring firm Pingdom thinks we should look at social networks differently.
The popularity of a social site such as MySpace or Twitter is frequently measured in unique users, page views, or user registrations. But a recent ministudy by Pingdom chose instead to look at how much of a proportional lock a given social network has on the countries' Web users. The tool of choice was Google Insights for Search, which was formally launched earlier this week.
Facebook, for example, started in the United States and still has more members there than in any other country. But there's more proportional "interest" in Facebook in Turkey, based on Google searches for the term. In second place is Canada, followed by the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Colombia.
For MySpace, the U.S. ranks at the top of the list when it comes to regional interest, followed by Puerto Rico, Australia, the U.K., and Malaysia. Beyond that, many American-founded social networks are much more popular overseas than at home: Friendster, which recently affirmed its focus on Asian countries, gathers the most "interest" in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Myanmar, respectively. The top five Google Insights locations for Hi5, founded in San Francisco, are Peru, Portugal, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica.
The rest of Pingdom's results can be found on the company's blog.
This post was updated at 8:06 PM PT to add comment from Bebo.
Remember that controversial study awhile back that pegged Facebook as having the worst performance out of major social media sites? Get ready for controversy, because a new one just came out that puts youth-oriented Bebo in the top, er, bottom spot, with Facebook pulling in a rather respectable ranking.
Representatives from Pingdom, a performance monitoring software company, posted a blog entry on Tuesday with the results of a study that monitored how much downtime 14 major social networks experienced between January 1 and February 25. Bebo, which is most popular in the U.K. and Ireland, clocked in a total of 12 hours and 28 minutes of downtime. In second place was Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces, with seven hours and 25 minutes of downtime recorded, and Friendster came in third with six hours even.
"More than 12 hours of downtime in less than two months is a lot, and it could possibly be caused by the new open application platform that Bebo launched in December, allowing third-party developers access to its platform, Facebook-style," the Pingdom blog post read. "It could be putting more strain on Bebo's systems than they anticipated."
Bebo representatives did not outright deny the downtime statistics, choosing instead to highlight the site's recent rapid growth and popularity of its developer platform. "Bebo has hit an all-time high in pageviews, capping off a favorable January, as reported by ComScore," a statement from the company read. "Last week, Bebo broke all previous pageview records and has recently enjoyed record-setting demand for two major initiatives launched at the end of 2007. To date, 400 media partners have joined Bebo's Open Media, and 1,300 applications are now available through Bebo's Open Application Platform. Our system is fully operational."
Pingdom monitors sites by regularly calling them up with automated "pings." "Downtime" is defined as when a site is unavailable, produces an error message, or takes more than 30 seconds to load.
Facebook and MySpace.com did comparatively well in the survey, with Facebook reportedly experiencing one hour and 35 minutes of downtime and News Corp.'s MySpace only 25 minutes. But the best performance came from Yahoo 360, more a Web of profiles than a social network proper, which clocked in only five minutes of unavailability.
Messaging site Twitter, whose frequent downtime has become somewhat of a Silicon Valley punchline, was not included in the survey.
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