Social networking – worth the wait?

Two things struck me when reading this article about Google’s Orkut being bigger than Facebook in India and Brazil.

First, that people are prepared to wait up to five minutes for a page to load.

Orkut – 1.5 minutes
Facebook – 2.5 minutes
Myspace – 5 minutes

You can quickly see why Orkut is favoured over the others.

Those of us with broadband connections to the internet quickly forget how lucky we are – I get frustrated if a site takes longer than two seconds or so to load on my screen.

Second, that through a mixutre of poor product management and complacency, the Internet is awash with bloatware – i.e. inefficient and badly architected software – which takes longer to download, clogs up the Internet and, in the long run, will hamper the companies creating it.