For the third quarter in a row, Facebook’s home page loaded faster than that of any of the other major social networks. However, the site only comes in fourth place for availability.

Facebook’s average load time for its home page was 1.06 seconds from October 1 through December 31, according to measurements by AlertSite. That speed is one second faster than the average benchmarked during this time period.

YouTube and Linked in ranked second and third, respectively, like they both did last quarter. Twitter came in fourth, followed by MySpace.

The slower-loading sites did better on availability than Facebook’s did, as it had 99.81 percent uptime. YouTube came in first place, with 99.99 percent, followed by Twitter at 99.92 percent and then MySpace at 99.91 percent. AlertSite calls the benchmark 99.86 percent, a wee bit higher than Facebook.

Some very notable outages, including a deliberate one, during the most recent quarter explain why Facebook had a wee bit less availability than what AlertSite considers a benchmark. Even so, the site is still available well more than 99 percent of the time, an impressive feat considering the vast number of users, enormous volume of clicks and relative youth of the company.

Surely Facebook plans to increase its availability, given that the company is investing $450 million to build its own data center in Rutherford, North Carolina. The location across the country from headquarters makes a solid backup-and-recovery strategy. It’s tantamount to responding to the AlertSite data with: “We are aware of this and fixing the situation.”

Readers, what do you think about the latest measurements of Facebook’s load time and availability?