Social networking site Facebook has been judged to be the slowest and most inaccessible social networking site, according to a new report.

According to research conducted by website and application monitoring service WatchMouse, despite its popularity amongst users, the network took the longest to load up.

Of 104 sites studied, 51 showed very slow loading times, achieving a so-called site performance index (SPI) of 1,000 or more.

In addition to Facebook, other social networks exhibiting slow performances included Twitter, last.fm and Friendster.

Commenting on the results, chief technical officer at WatchMouse Mark Pors stated: “It is interesting to see that popular networking sites turn out to have very bad performance.

“It is surprising they still have such a big fan base when they serve their users so badly.”

The slowness of sites such as Facebook is surprising because they use Ajax technology, which is designed to increase speed and functionality, he added.

Ajax is a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating web applications and is characterised by its ability to increase the responsiveness of web pages.

Summarising the findings, Mr Pors said: “For now, the sites will need to do a lot of work to remain popular and improve their performance.”

Not all the networks performed badly, however, with Faceparty achieving an SPI of 303, meaning the site can be accessed more quickly by users than some of its rivals.

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