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In an effort to answer the question "which social network is most reliable?", the folks of Royal Pingdom measured the uptime of 12 popular social networks - MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Orkut, Friendster, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Bebo, Last.fm, Reunion.com, Classmates.com and Yahoo! 360 - over a three month period.
As it turns out, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft's social network (drink up if you haven't had any idea that Microsoft has a social network) fared poorly, with 3 hours downtime in the measured period. Yahoo! 360 (drink up again if you also had no idea that Yahoo has a social network) was the best of the bunch with absolutely zero downtime, but it was closely followed by Facebook and MySpace which both had only 10 minutes of downtime.
Overall, the results are quite good, with half of the networks having less than one hour of downtime over the three month period; personally, I'd expect worse, so I was pleasantly surprised to know that our social networks are so reliable.