Social networks are more popular than ever, and are flourishing in the Web 2.0 era. With their huge user numbers, it is very important for these websites to have a high availability. For the largest social networks, a broken website usually means closing the door on millions of people.

To see how reliable they are, we took 12 of the largest social network sites in the world and tested their availability (uptime) over a one-month period. The included sites were MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Orkut, Friendster, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Bebo, Last.fm, Reunion.com, Classmates.com and Yahoo! 360.

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.

In contrast, Yahoo’s old initiative in the social network arena, Yahoo! 360⁰ (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.

Social networks, by their very nature, have users who are very active and visit the site frequently, generating a lot of page views. This makes any downtime more noticeable, since it means a larger loss of page views than for a “normal” site (view an older article expanding on this). In the Windows Live Spaces example, three hours may not sound like all that much over a month, but it is three hours of lost page views and ad exposure that Microsoft will never get back.

Note:

The survey measured the home pages of the 12 included social network sites from October 19 to November 19, 2007. If a home page did not respond within 30 seconds, or gave an error back, it was counted as down.

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

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Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

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Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

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The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

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