By Robert Lockard

Twitter has come a long way since 2007. It exploded in popularity in 2009, though it still has yet to reach the heights of either Facebook or MySpace in terms of monthly visitors. You can read more about this in my Submit Solution blog entry, “MySpace is 3 times as popular as Twitter.”

Not only has Twitter gone from having less than 1 million visitors a month to nearly 20 million, it has also improved its downtime. Alas, just like its number of visitors, Twitter is far worse than every other major social-media site in its total amount of downtime per year. It’s getting better, but Twitter still suffers from frequent crashes. Remember the big one earlier this year?

I read some fascinating analyses of Twitter’s downtime in two Royal Pingdom articles: “Twitter growing pains cause lots of downtime in 2007” and “Social network downtime in 2008.” Check out this chart of the major social-media sites’ downtime, in hours:

The good news for Twitter, as these Royal Pingdom articles point out, is that the vast majority (84 percent) of its downtime took place in the first half of 2008. That means the second half of 2008 was a vast improvement and it could mean Twitter is well on its way to getting up to Facebook’s and MySpace’s level.

Even if you combine the total downtime of Facebook and MySpace, Twitter was seven times longer than them. That’s quite amazing. Maybe it’s like I said in my last blog entry on Twitter – the company could be on the verge of proving itself as a real contender in the fight for dominance of social media.

Twitter has never really been known for its reliability, but it could soon change that image. I look forward to seeing 2009’s numbers to see how Twitter is improving.

This blog entry is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post, “Twitter downtime worse than other social media.” The Social Network Downtime graph is the copyright of Royal Pingdom.