If you’ve been on Twitter at all in the month of June it’s no secret the site has had issue after issue after issue. What was Twitter’s reaction to the series of performance issues? Yesterday, Twitter released a blog post, explaining in detail the exact problem that caused the outages. “We're working through tweaks to our system in order to provide greater stability at a time when we're facing record traffic. We have long-term solutions that we are working towards, but in the meantime, we are making real-time adjustments so that we can grow our capacity and avoid outages during the World Cup.”

Twitter announced a new feature called Twitter Places. Now Twitter users can tag their tweets along with their location and also add new places to the list. Users can also select a particular location and view all the tweets coming from there. World Cup Fans will love this new addition. This means that you can easily see the live tweets from any stadium in South Africa by selecting their stadium venues.

We’ve been reporting an awful lot about technical issues with Twitter, we even thought it was all figured out a few days ago. Within the last hour Twitter has placed two reports on Twitter Status. The first issue came just over an hour ago with what has become the normal “bursts of elevated errors” message. The second notice, reported just 15 minutes ago, reports of issues with incorrect tweet counts.

Yesterday, we reported about continuous Twitter breakdowns and Twitter’s efforts to contain them. However, it looks like the micro-blogging site was not able to fully gauge the enormity of the problem. The site again experienced ‘availability issues’ early this morning. The problem was finally fixed, but the relief was short-lived as the site started to hiccup again.

Twitter recently reached 2 billion tweets per month milestone, but it seems like heavy traffic has taken its toll on the site’s performance. Today has been the first day in a while with no such problems reported. For the better part of the week, Twitter has experienced several incidences of poor site performance. In its blog, Twitter mentioned that the breakdown was due to one of its internal sub-networks being over-capacity. It also said that their internal network was temporarily misconfigured and was not being properly monitored.

Before now, Twitter has been a fairly open entity.  Yeah there is only one Twitter, but any developer is totally free to create a client of their own and become the next TweetDeck.  The simplicity and openness is part of the charm: sort of a blank canvas upon which we, the denizens of the internet, can paint our thoughts.  For better or worse, Twitter will very soon be changing the regulations regarding a client’s ability to connect to their servers.  Apparently as of June 30th, all Twitter clients must utilize OAuth.

This year’s World Cup, which takes place in South Africa, has already begun. To bring you all the latest updates, Twitter announced the launch of their special site which would exclusively cover all the latest happenings of the World Cup. Twitter.com/worldcup will undoubtedly act as a real time source for World Cup updates by bringing together tweets from players, news, and people at the event.

Twitter seems to be on a roll. The micro-blogging site recently reached its 2 billion tweets a month milestone. The company has now announced its acquisition of Smallthought Systems. The company will integrate with Twitter’s analytics team and will focus on combining ideas from Trendly (web analytics program developed by Smallthought) into Twitter’s current tools. Twitter has long ties with Smallthought. Up until a year ago, Twitter used their Dabble DB, an online database, to track and share information about its projects internally.

Twitter hit 1 billion tweets per month mark in December 2009 (and more recently hit 50 million tweets per day). It took the micro blogging service less than 6 months to add another billion tweets to its monthly traffic. According to Royal Pingdom, Twitter had 64 million tweets a day in May. This roughly translates to 2.7 million tweets per hour or 741 tweets per second. The website had predicted this feat over a month ago in a post that estimated total monthly tweets until Jan 2010

The social networking site, Twitter, has recently improved their online help center. With the ongoing growth of the networking site, there was a need to improve their online customer support area. The new help center broadcasts translations in Spanish, French, Italian and German languages with the Japanese translation in the works. Next, you can expect an easier way to find the articles related to your questions. Help articles were integrated into Zendesk; and in case you need further human assistance, the Twitter team is all ready to serve. The help team now boasts a response time for all queries within a period of 12 hours.

TweetUp, a search and advertising startup, launched yesterday at Disrupt. Serial entrepreneur Bill Gross appeared on stage and unveiled TweetUp’s core service. They call the service “Adsense for Twitter”, as it has an algorithm that sorts tweets based on relevance and importance.  Tweetup does have the potential to benefit all parties. Advertisers can promote themselves in a relevant manner, plus readers will see tweets that are relevant, this improving the flow of information.

All those Twitter users that have great scientific minds have got a chance to participate in a behind the scenes Tweetup organized by NASA and the World Science Festival. However, the opportunity is limited to 100 Twitter followers and so the competition will indeed be very tough as they want not just “great scientific minds” but “world’s best and brightest scientific minds.” The program is scheduled to take place on Saturday, June 5 (2:00pm EST) at the World Science Festival in New York City. The event showcases 40 unique programs in various scientific disciplines that range from astronomy, physics and genetics to neuroscience, robotics and mathematics.

So you’re addicted to Twitter, you don’t like paying for things you shouldn’t have to, you’ve got an iPhone, but you’ve yet to take 20 minutes out of your day to Jailbreak the sucker (or can’t figure out how).  What can you do?  Well, now thanks to a joint effort by both twitter and iTunes, there is a (legitimate) free twitter client available for both the iPhone and the iPod touch.  Sure sure, they’ve existed for years in either free OR legitimate versions, but now you can have your cake and eat it too.

Twitter has taken its business features to the next level by planning for the launch of Twitter Business Center. Mashable has confirmed with Twitter that beta testing of the new feature has begun. Mashable has quoted Twitter as saying, “only a handful of accounts have these features presently.” One of the best features so far is the option for businesses to accept direct messages from people they aren’t following. This can be good news for bringing more customer service functions to Twitter.

Over at Twitter Media, a new tool called Blackbird Pie was posted today that can convert tweets to html for easily embedded around the Web. So far Blackbird Pie seems to be working well for most. Some have reported it works fine, while others are having issues. It is important to note that Blackbird Pie is not an “official feature,” just a new addition released by a helpful developer who has found it to be useful for himself.