Windows Live Spaces, for once, is the leader of the pack in the social networking arena. Up against rivals such as MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Orkut, Friendster, Xanga, Bebo, Last.fm, Reunion.com, Classmates.com and Yahoo! 360, Windows Live Space has really failed to stand out from the crowd so far. But no more. According to statistics made available by Pingdom, Windows Live Spaces has managed to eclipse all its rivals, but not in terms of the traffic it attracts or for a boost in audience, but for amounting to the largest downtime in a single month.

"Windows Live Spaces (formerly known as MSN Spaces), Microsoft's social network with an estimated 27 million unique visitors per month, finished last in the test with a total of three hours of downtime. The majority of that downtime occurred during US daytime on October 19 (a Friday), so it must have affected a very large amount of users", Pingdom revealed.

Pingdom tested all the home pages of the social networking hotspots mentioned above October 19 to November 19, 2007. If the pages returned errors or were unresponsive for more than 30 seconds, Pingdom simply added to the downtime. Yahoo 360 performed the best with absolutely no downtime at all throughout an entire month, at the opposite pole of Windows Live Spaces. Facebook and MySpace are neck and neck in the race for the most available social network, and in this sense, both occupy the second position behind Yahoo.

"In contrast, Yahoo's old initiative in the social network arena, Yahoo 360 (which looks like it will be to be replaced with Yahoo Mash during 2008) came out on top with zero downtime, while the two social network giants MySpace and Facebook (both fighting for supremacy) only had 10 minutes of downtime each during the same period", Pingdom added.