14 DAY TRIAL // Speed has been one of Google's main selling points and its engineers are always looking for ways of squeezing out even better loading times. But Facebook is not doing so bad itself, the social network is the fastest site in the social space. Availability isn't its biggest strength though, YouTube takes the crown in that department, according to data from AlertSite.
"For the third consecutive quarter, Facebook’s home page was the fastest to load among top social networking sites. Between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31 it took the page 1.06 seconds to be displayed," AlertSite wrote.
"YouTube and LinkedIn retained their hold on the number two and three spots, respectively," it added.
Facebook was more than a second faster than the average among sites monitored. YouTube's homepage loaded on average in 1.36 seconds, the fastest it has been to date. LinkedIn is also above average, loading in 1.7 seconds. Twitter took 2.76 seconds.
The data focuses on social networks, which YouTube could be loosely categorized as. Other large websites may be faster, the spartan Google homepage most likely takes the number one spot overall.
"In terms of uptime, YouTube came out on top with 99.99 percent availability, its best performance of the year. YouTube also had its most impressive average quarterly response time (1.36 seconds)," the monitoring company also revealed.
YouTube saw a great quarter when it comes to availability, which was also on the rise. The site had 99.99 percent availability, pretty much the industry gold standard. Surprisingly, given its track record, Twitter had a great quarter as well with 99.92 availability and MySpace was very close with 99.91 percent.
Facebook only had 99.81 availability, good enough for the fourth spot. That's not necessarily an indication of how stable Facebook is, the team had to take the site down for a period recently when several features were pushed prematurely.
