Social network Bebo, the San Francisco-based startup with great popularity in the United Kingdom and Ireland, leads the pack of social networks in one embarrassing measure -- the amount of time the site has been unavailable so far this year.
According to a report in the Royal Pingdom blog, which tracks the response time of various sites around the internet, Bebo was unavailable for almost 12.5 hours during January and February. Windows Live Spaces and Friendster came in next, with more han seven hours and six hours of downtime respectively. By contrast, Yahoo 360 was down for five minutes, blogging site LiveJournal for 10, and social network giant MySpace a mere 25 minutes over the first two months of 2008.
Not noted in the report is status-message broadcaster Twitter, which, so far in 2008, has a downtime of 20 hours, 21 minutes.
What's behind all the downtime? Bebo's downtime has seen a swift upswing since the launch of their developer platform in mid-December. The social network has also been the target of a rumored $1 billion acquisition offer, though nothing has been confirmed as of yet.
David Ulevitch, CEO of infrastructure startup Open DNS, who first noticed and helped correct this weekend's YouTube outage, noted that downtime, while an ignoble feat, might signal a healthy problem for startups. "Scaling operations isn't easy, and doing it without causing downtime is even harder. Downtime can happen for a couple reasons -- you are scaling and growing so fast that you can't keep up with demand -- or you aren't growing, and maybe your staff is leaving and the ship is falling apart. No way to tell by looking at a number.
"The real winners are those companies that can grow and scale without their users noticing, or if anything, their users notice increased performance and accessibility." Ulevitch said.
