Akamai: 1M Social Media Requests a Second

Akamai Technologies (AKAM), the leading content delivery network, said today that traffic from social media sites on its platform now exceeds more than 1 million requests per second. The new data was included in a press release from Akamai touting the growth of its social media business. Akamai works with a lengthy list of leading social media destination sites, including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Metacafe.

Akamai said several of its fastest-growing customers are not the social networks themselves, but content providers creating widgets that are distributed on Facebook, MySpace or other social networks. One is Slide, which is the leading application provider on Facebook with more than 50 million unique users each month. The company's popular widgets include Slideshows, FunWall and Super Poke.

"Traffic to the Slide network has grown more than 500 percent this past year," said Ken Brownfield, Director of IT at Slide. "Our already heavily-tuned load times were decreased by an additional 50 to 75 percent by utilizing Akamai, which is critical for an ideal user experience."

Another widget provider using Akamai is RockYou, which provides photo slideshows, glitter text, voicemail accessories and custom applications to help Facebook users personalize their profiles. With more than 38 million users, RockYou serves over 180 million widget views per day in more than 200 countries.

"Over the last year, many of these companies saw not only unexpected growth, but considerably enhanced their sites to include more rich and dynamic features," said Tim Napoleon, Chief Strategist, Media and Entertainment at Akamai. "With social media sites becoming increasingly interactive, Akamai is continually innovating to support the technology requirements driven by this evolving segment."

Akamai said its social media business has grown at the expense of other content network providers, saying a "tidal wave" of adoption had driven companies to switch to Akamai. "Many of these companies were previously using other Content Delivery Networks or leveraging in-house technology, but over the last year realized their growth had surpassed the ability of those solutions to continue to manage the delivery and acceleration needs of their sites," Akamai said in its release.