* Only 5 social networks managed an overall uptime of 99.9% or better: Facebook (99.92%), MySpace (99.94%), Classmates.com (99.95%), Xanga (99.95%) and Imeem (99.95%). Again, it should be pointed out that Imeem was only monitored from May 9 and onward while the other sites were monitored the entire year.* The single most massive social network incident in 2008 happened to Friendster. The service had a data center outage in November that caused more than 23 hours of downtime in a time span of less than 3 days. If it weren’t for that incident, Friendster would have placed much better in this survey.
* 84% of Twitter’s downtime happened during the first half of 2008. July and onward has seen a big improvement in site availability for Twitter.
* 77% of LiveJournal’s downtime happened in Q4 of 2008. It is too early to say if this is indicative of a trend or if it was a temporary lapse in uptime due to the service’s migration to a new hosting provider.
* LinkedIn’s downtime has been increasing over the year. Each quarter has seen a larger amount of downtime than the one before it.
Social networkers risk 'losing control' of privacy: Users of social-networking sites such as Facebook risk losing control of their personal information because they are not fully aware of the implications for their privacy, a freedom of information expert warned Wednesday.
Facebook was forced to revert to its old user-ownership policy following a backlash from users.
Data-protection specialist Mark Gleeson told CNN that social networking users should be very careful about what information they post on the Web.
Easier to mess up love life on social networks: Shayna Hefner never expected MySpace to turn her life upside down.
