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.

Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

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What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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Think about the software you use day to day. Depending on your profession and interests, what you use will vary, but some applications tend to show up over and over again. Microsoft Word and Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, various web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Skype, iTunes, and so on.

When it comes to those widely used, highly established desktop applications, think about how long it’s been since they first saw the light of day. Many of them are practically ancient.

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