Twitter has been open about its recent shortcomings, with outages piling up as World Cup fever grips its userbase, resulting in the service becoming patchy and unreliable.

This is becoming an all too familiar sight...

According to a posting to the official Twitter blog, the service has been suffering under the record traffic and unusual weight of updates hitting the micro-blogging service this month. Apparently, these issues had been a while coming, but the sudden explosion of interest in the service around the World World cup, things have gone south for Twitter very quickly indeed. While the folks at Twitter have been making ‘real-time adjustments’ so that it can maintain the service as well as possible during the spike in traffic.

That said, the blog post was fairly honest about the way that things have been going, saying,

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Google has announced a new feature for its YouTube video service that will allow users to send updates directly to their subscribers through the medium of YouTube Bulletins.

According to a page added to the YouTube Help pages, bulletins are an effort to create an easy method of communication between channel owners and subscribers. The bulletins work in a way that will likely be familiar to anyone who remembers the MySpace Bulletins of old; they’re posted directly to the “recent activity” module on you subscribers’ various homepages, meaning that they’ll see it as they log in. It’s also displayed on the channel page itself.

According to the page itself, you can send a bulletin to your subscribers fairly easily, following five steps,

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Late Tuesday night, Google announced and simultaneously sort-of-launched its latest push into the social networking game, the fairly simply named Google Buzz.

Of course, as with many of Google’s other, more interesting ventures, it wasn’t made widely available immediately, likely for fear that something on the technical side might not be able to support all of Google’s Gmail users deciding they’d like to see what the new service was all about. Still, despite the fact that some estimates yesterday put the total number of Gmail accounts with access to Google Buzz at around the 1% mark, it seems that those who wanted access to the service found a way to get access.

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Google’s big announcement from yesterday evening saw the company detail a new social-networking style service that simply goes by the name of Google Buzz.

It’s an interesting move, and one that sees Google attaching what ammounts to a Twitter or Facebook-updates style functionality to a number of its different web-based services. It’s a curious move, but Google has managed to be fairly persuasive about it, to say nothing of being quick to point out the plethora of different services to which Google Buzz can be appended, including Picasa, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

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Facebook is rolling out a service that will see users able to reply to comments left on their updates simply by replying to the email notification that they receive informing them that someone has left a comment.

It’s a relatively simple update, and indeed, one that some Facebook users (who had their Facebook’s set to languages they could read) twigged a couple of months back, before Facebook confirmed that it was working on something to allow users to reply directly from their email inboxes. It’s a relatively simple idea, and one that could see Facebook’s comments skyrocket when it comes to those of us who receive mail directly to mobile devices but aren’t bothered opening Facebook apps every few minutes.

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Facebook has started rolling out its new privacy settings, which give users a fair bit more control over just who can see their status updates and various uploads, but underneath all that there’s something a little less respectable happening. Facebook is making itself a bit more like Twitter.

Facebook may well be giving users a little more room to breathe when it comes to choosing who sees their updates, which is all well and good, but it’s also taken the opportunity to make sure thatthe option to make status updates something a little more public is front and centre, with the “Everyone” update in the same list. That’s what’s got users reminded of Twitter, a service that many have said Facebook tries quite hard to ape when it comes to status updates.

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Yahoo is to push further into Facebook integration than it already has in the first half of 2010. It’s announced that it is to start “deeply” integrating Facebook Connect with its own services, including Mail and News.

Earlier this year, Yahoo told us all that it wasn’t a search company, which raised all kinds of questions about how it had managed to gain such a substantial block of the search market. It then rebranded itself as a kind of ultimate homepage, boasting news, mail and support for users to post Facebook status updates without having to leave Yahoo’s own page, which means more people spending more time on Yahoo… something it clearly wanted.

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It’s started to look as though Facebook will soon allow its users to comment on other users status updates without the inconvenience of having to actually, y’know, leaving the safety and comfort of their own mail client.

The whole thing is reminiscent of the release of Facebook Lite.

TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook’s latest move has already been rolled out to a very select group of users, having managed to narrow down about four tweets that mention users have noticed that they can already use Facebook’s latest addition. If nothing else, this could well be a godsend for those desperate to keep up to date and in the mix with Facebook from offices where the social networking service has been blocked.

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Facebook has today launched a new feature for users of its Pages service designed specifically to allow those users to share their Facebook status updates to Twitter automatically.

The new feature is for now only available to users with a Facebook Page, as opposed the standard Facebook profile you and I might own. This is a feature for people with “Fans” who might be interested in making the whole process of running a Facebook fan page and a Twitter profile for everyone to follow a little easier. Still though, it’s hard not to see this (as with so many other attempts to marry Facebook and Twitter) as sorely misguided.

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