Twitter: Still not working, but explaining why on Twitter Status blog

After months of awful communication with its users amid problems, the micro-messaging service Twitter is finally starting to come around. Tonight the site launched a new Twitter Status blog to keep everyone appraised of what exactly is going on. Smart move.

The blog, run using the Tumblr micro-blogging platform, will allow the company to provide quick updates when something breaks — or as the case may be, something is fixed. That was in fact the case tonight as Twitter announced that the pagination feature of the site had finally been restored after taking it down days ago to relieve stress on the servers.

Perhaps most importantly, Twitter let users know about this new Status site tonight on the main Twitter page itself. This is in contrast to Twitter having a help page on the online customer service site Get Satisfaction, but never publicizing it on the main page of the site during problems.

In other news, there is still no final word on the rumored to be finalized Twitter funding (which GigaOM first reported), but a little birdie tells us we’ll hear something soon.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha and Chris Morrison. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

update: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told us the following about the new blog:

“This new blog will be used specifically to communicate on the overall subject of performance and is the place to look if something isn’t right. Ideally, we’ll have good as well as bad news about the health of the service.”

He also notes that featured on the Twitter Status blog is a link to the service’s uptime statistics provided by Pingdom. This is helpful, but don’t really address when the site is up but not fully functional — as has been the case the the past week or so.