This article was published on September 11, 2010

Flickr and Orkut lead the social media uptime league


Flickr and Orkut lead the social media uptime league

Want to know how reliable your favourite social media site is? A newly-launched service will tell you just that.

Social.Downornot.com from Watchmouse measures the uptime of a range of social sites and offers their current status along with an overview of their performance over the past week. Each of the 20 sites covered by the service is regularly checked, and if the result is wrong or is received after eight seconds, it is noted as an error and unavailable.

So, who’s winning the uptime league? Watchmouse says that only Google’s Orkut (little used outside Brazil and India) has registered 100% uptime between 1 August and 7 September. Flickr and Delicious were close runners up with 99.99% and 99.97% respectively. Meanwhile, Watchmouse registered that over a third of sites returned ‘unacceptable’ results. The bottom performer was MySpace (95.63%), followed by YouTube (95.93%).

While the uptime of popular websites would hardly be considered gripping entertainment by many, Watchmouse’s service is actually fascinating to delve into. We can see in the screenshot below, for example, that Twitter’s website has been doing pretty well over the past week. You can see the past 24 hours’ performance on a map and as you’ll see, it’s good everywhere except China which is clearly visible as a big red blob. Seeing as Twitter is blocked there, that’s no surprise.

It’s worth noting, though, that this service is only measuring uptime of the websites themselves – it doesn’t count all the times Twitter (for example) is down as a service. Watchmouse’s nine month old API Status service has that side of things covered.

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