You know which social networking site was better in 2008, in terms of downtime? Well, a new study released this week by the web monitoring company, Pingdom well answers the question. Pingdom, which is well known for its reliable surveys, released its study on social networking sites on Tuesday. 

According to Pingdom study, the downtime of more than a day and a half troubled 33% of social networking sites, but MySpace and Facebook experienced less downtime than most other social networking sites in 2008.

Analyzing the data on outages and downtime for 15 most popular social networking sites of the world, the Pingdom study noted that there was big difference in time the sites suffered outages.

The Pingdom study titled “Social network downtime in 2008” recorded that five to 30 minutes brief outages were common, but one-third sites suffered more than a day and a half of downtime, and one-third had less than eight hours of downtime.

The study found that Facebook, MySpace, Classmates.com, Xanga, and Imeem were the sites that remained available 99.9% of the time.

The study noted that Twitter had more downtime than any of the other social networking sites, but its showed great improvement in the latter half of the year. "July and onward has seen a big improvement in site availability for Twitter," the researchers wrote in the study.

Twitter, according to the study, was the worst of the 15 social-networking services, with an embarrassing 84 hours of downtime in the first half of the year and ending the year with uptime of 99.04 percent.

The study recorded that LinkedIn, whose downtime went up as the time moved on, with 63% of its downtime happening during the latter half of the year, was the second worst site.

Friendster, which had one of the longest outages, when it remained down for more than 23 hours over the course of three days in November because of a data center problem, was the third worst, according to the study.

The study noted that Reunion.com suffered the longest continuous outage went to for a nearly 10-hour outage on March 29.

According to the Pingdom study, the top to bottom ranking include — 

1.    Facebook
2.    MySpace
3.    Classmates.com
4.    Xanga
5.    Imeem
6.    Google's Orkut (11.2 hours of downtime)
7.    Last.fm (12.5 hours of downtime)
8.    LiveJournal (16.1 hours of downtime)
9.    Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces (17 hours of downtime)
10.    Hi5 (22.1 hours of downtime)
11.    AOL's Bebo (38.6 hours of downtime),
12.    Reunion.com (41.9 hours of downtime)
13.    Friendster (43.8 hours of downtime)
14.    LinkedIn (45.8 hours of downtime)
15.    Twitter (84 hours of downtime)

According to Pingdom, downtime can occur due to glitches with scalability stemming from surging numbers of users and switching to different service providers. Social networking sites should address the problems resulting in downtime, because it harms their reputation.