ReadWriteWeb

There were reports of widespread outages of Twitter's main Web site Saturday, with speculation centering on the problems stemming from a flood of New Year's greetings.

We asked Twitter for comment and will update as soon as we hear back. "Our engineers have identified the issue and Twitter is now almost fully recovered," Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner said in an email at 4:30 p.m. ET Saturday.

By 2:50 p.m. ET, MSNBC was reporting that the site was "slowly coming back online" and there seemed to be few problems with accessing the site and posting messages by 4:15 p.m. ET. The only official indication from Twitter that something was amiss came Saturday morning, when the company posted "Users may currently be experiencing some site issues; our engineers are working on resolving this issue" on its status microblog.

If the site goes down again -- particularly as you hope to send out your New Year's tweets as the calendar turns in your part of the world -- try using an app or the mobile site. Some users reported success posting messages using clients like HootSuite, TweetCaster and Twitter's own TweetDeck during the earlier outage.

Back in June of this year, Opera revealed their ambitious plan to "reinvent the web" with the release of Opera Unite, a new feature of their desktop web browser that effectively turns your computer into a server. With tools like a chat application, a photo sharing app, a file sharing app, a media player, and more, the idea behind Unite was to forgo the "cloud" and share your files with others directly from your PC instead. Using peer-to-peer technology that operates through the browser interface, Opera Unite seemed to be going against the current trend that is cloud computing and that didn't win them much love from the tech community.

Despite its ho-hum reception, the company is moving forward with its plans to make Unite a full-fledged feature of the Opera browser. Today, the Opera Unite beta is launching and will be made available in Opera 10.10. Given the recent cloud outages, one has to wonder if Unite will be given a second look by the crowd of naysayers who so recently belittled it.