Myspace and Facebook are the two giants in the social network arena. We let them face off in three categories: the number of searches in Google, website traffic, and availability. All to see which one comes out on top.

Website traffic

How much traffic do they have? The answer is “a lot”. According to Alexa.com (www.alexa.com), Myspace is the 6th most popular website in the world. Facebook is “only” the 8th.

Facebook is gaining rapidly on Myspace, though, which can be clearly seen in the graph below.

Winner: Myspace

Searches in Google

When you are curious about something, more often than not, you will search for it. That is why Google Trends (trends.google.com) can be extremely useful for examining, well, trends.

In this case we see that more people search for Myspace than Facebook, but once again, Facebook is catching up quickly.

Winner: Myspace

Availability

Since we are an uptime monitoring company, after all, we couldn’t resist including how the two websites are performing availability-wise.

Winner: Myspace

The trend for the future is clear

Myspace may have won this round, but if Google Trends and the Alexa.com traffic graph is any indication, Myspace will soon be unseated by Facebook as the number one social network in the world. Since uptime is harder to predict, we will leave that one alone.

Sources:

Alexa.com: Traffic graph for Myspace vs. Facebook.
Google: Search volume for Myspace vs. Facebook.
Pingdom: Myspace vs. Facebook downtime numbers are from Pingdom GIGRIB.
Uptime report page for www.myspace.com.
Uptime report page for www.facebook.com.

(A small comment regarding the downtime numbers: In some cases these websites put up maintenance pages which respond to monitoring as if they were normal pages. This is therefore not reflected in the numbers shown here, which only include when the websites didn’t respond or gave an error back.)

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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