Facebook Is Fastest Social Network, LinkedIn Most Reliable

Facebook's home page loaded the fastest among major social-networking sites during the third quarter, while LinkedIn had the best uptime, according to a study from website performance monitor AlertSite.

It took on average one second for Facebook.com to be displayed, even though the world's most popular social network had a couple of site outages in September, AlertSite said.

LinkedIn, designed for professional networking, ranked second with an average response time of 1.33 seconds, followed by YouTube (1.60 seconds), which was included because it has some social-networking capabilities.

Microblogging site Twitter (2.93 seconds) and social network MySpace (3.61 seconds) ranked fourth and fifth.

In terms of uptime, LinkedIn led the pack with 99.97 percent, followed by YouTube with 99.93 percent, MySpace (99.89 percent), Facebook (99.76 percent) and Twitter (99.74 percent).

"The performance of the major social networks is steadily moving in the right direction as the year progresses. On average, response times have decreased, and the availability across all sites has increased," wrote AlertSite's Josh Hrinik in a blog post.

Studies over the years have concluded that there is a direct relationship between the speed and reliability of a site and the level of usage and engagement it attains with its visitors.