WatchMouse Launches Social.DownorNot.com

New public website monitors and measures the “live health” of 20 popular social networking websites and their services including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Flickr, and others. Site gives users, developers and other interested parties a single place to see the availability and performance of their favorite social network, worldwide.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands (PRWEB) September 9, 2010

WatchMouse, a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring, announced the launch today of Social.DownorNot.com, a new public website dedicated to measuring the performance of the world’s leading social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Flickr, and others. The new site was built using the Public Status Pages (PSP) technology of WatchMouse, and allows anyone to see the live health, performance and recent history of their favorite social networking sites and their services across various countries.

“There is a prevalent trend toward transparency. Revealing information frequently and often – both good and bad – is the only way to amass positive impressions, reduce interactions with higher cost-per-contact channels, and directly influence your reputation,” stated Mark Pors, CTO and co-founder of WatchMouse. “Our Public Status Pages let any company reveal the current status of their website, API’s and web services on a public page hosted in the cloud. Most of the social networking companies we monitor on Social.DownorNot.com do not have a dedicated place where they can broadcast when their services are not working correctly. They use blogs or a page on their website to get the word out when something’s wrong. Social.DownorNot.com now provides a way for users, developers and other interested parties to view the status of their favorite social network, worldwide.”

Each of the 20 social networking sites on Social.DownorNot.com is checked for a valid result on each of the sites’ home and login pages, and if the result is wrong or is received after eight seconds, it is noted as an error and unavailable. The percentage of availability or uptime is based on the number of errors reported. Additional details on Social.DownorNot.com include a 7-day history along with graphs that include a 24-hour snapshot and performance indication by country.

Performance Comparison
To coincide with the launch of Social.DownorNot.com, WatchMouse monitored the availability and performance of 20 leading social networking websites during the period of August 1, 2010 to September 7, 2010. The results revealed that only Orkut recorded 100% uptime, followed closely by Flickr (99.99%), Del.icio.us (99.97%) and hi5 (99.93%). Facebook came in at 99.90% due to recent DNS issues, and Digg managed to land in the bottom five due to issues associated with their version 4 release the last week of August. More than one-third of the social networking sites monitored fell into the unacceptable category including MySpace (95.63%), followed by YouTube (95.93%), Classmates (96.98%), Digg (97.84%), StumbleUpon (97.99%), Foursquare (98.83%) and Xanga (98.88%).

“Young companies like Foursquare which have gained popularity and success quickly are likely to have growing pains such as site overload or breakage,” continued Pors. “More established websites however, such as MySpace and YouTube that are linked to larger organizations should not have any excuses. Some social networking sites like Twitter with their dev.twitter.com public status web page, are openly transparent about their site issues, and believe it’s better to communicate issues with their services rather than leave their audience guessing. This saves them time and money by deflecting costly customer service contacts, and also engenders goodwill with developers and consumers alike.”

A full report on all 20 social networking websites’ uptime is available by contacting press@watchmouse.com. The real time status and statistical data on each website can be viewed at http://social.downornot.com.

About WatchMouse
http://www.watchmouse.com/about

Media Contacts:
Mindy M. Hull                    
Mercury Global Partners for WatchMouse
Tel. +1 415 889 9977 (US)
Tel. +31 62 504 7680 (NL)

Ginny Cain
Mercury Global Partners for WatchMouse
Tel. +1 925 426 0646 (US)
Tel. +33 95 335 0224 (FR)

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