Transparency in reporting of major social network performance recently received a shot in the arm courtesy of WatchMouse. Using their Public Status Pages, WatchMouse now tracks 20 giant social networks’ uptime and other performance metrics at Social.DownorNot.com.
Specifically, users can view the performance speed and uptime of home pages, login pages, and APIs from Classmates, Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Friendster, Gowalla, Hi5, Hyves, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Orkut, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Xanga, Xing, Yelp, and YouTube. If upon automatic checking any site returns errors or takes longer than 8 seconds to respond, it’s marked as error and unavailable. The uptime percentage has its basis in the number of errors reported by such checks.
Social.DownorNot.com users can also get a 7 day glimpse into the overall performance of the networks.
WatchMouse’s newest feature affords users the opportunity to see the status of a social network they’re experiencing problems using, but that may not yet have updated its support or status pages. It also lets users track the growth of newer services versus the presence of established players. And as difficulties for Digg during the implementation of version 4 resulting in downtime reported by WatchMouse demonstrated, users can also see firsthand the effects of developments as they unfold.
While such transparency might make lesser companies nervous, major social networks should recognize the importance of uptime and performance with regard to public opinion, and hold themselves accountable when the health of their networks is exposed – for good or ill. WatchMouse proposes that Social.DownorNot.com is a step forward for users, but also a chance for companies to make a positive impact by maintaining impressive figures – above and beyond the sheer impact stellar performance has on their user experience. [PRWeb]
