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August 26, 2007

Twitter Adds Gmail Import Feature

Duncan Riley

23 comments »

twtr1.jpg

Buried by the news this week of Twitter adding search was another Twitter feature release: invite friends.

The new invite friends option in Twitter allows users to invite friends by adding an email address or by importing Gmail contacts.

Twitter investor Fred Wilson writes that to date “Twitter has made it nearly impossible to find friends on Twitter. That’s a very big shortcoming of an inherently social service. It sort of makes me wonder how Twitter got any users at all.” According to Wilson the new feature overcomes that problem and that he “just tried it out and it worked great for me.”

See our previous Twitter coverage here.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. New Twitter Visualization Tools Coming: First Is Twitter Blocks « iBrian

    September 1st, 2007 at 1:01 am

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  1. eli

    August 26th, 2007 at 8:45 pm

    are you transcribing Fred Wilson’s blog over to Techcrunch now, Duncan?

  2. A Taylor

    August 26th, 2007 at 8:47 pm

    It will be interesting at this point to see if the number of Twitter users spikes exponentially the next few weeks.

    If so this might be a good time to justify a new round of venture funding to round out the Twitter feature set even more.

  3. um

    August 26th, 2007 at 9:01 pm

    This doesn’t seem like a newsworthy feature, just my opinion. That’s probably the reason it was overlooked.

  4. mike

    August 26th, 2007 at 9:06 pm

    Who gives a damn?!

  5. Duncan Riley

    August 26th, 2007 at 9:08 pm

    eli
    no, but the quote summed up what Fred (an investor) thought about it.

  6. Steve Cans

    August 26th, 2007 at 9:09 pm

    As you can see on Fred Wilson’s Twitter page he only joined Twitter in March of 2007 - when all the hype really imploded!!!!

    If he had joined in 2006, he would have been aware that the Search feature existed back then! But was removed due to the scalability problems Twitter faced.
    The search feature *actually* helped the service take off back then.

    So, he’s a board member and it’s not even aware of Twitter’s feature history? :)
    You can see that he only looked at Twitter after it got traction - certainly he saw the service before but didn’t see the value to even register…

  7. huh?

    August 26th, 2007 at 9:30 pm

    Shocking news! I wish techcrunch would devote even more time on such tech shattering news. Please keep us posted if they change anything like font size or background color.

  8. DG

    August 26th, 2007 at 9:46 pm

    Duncan.. Is this NEWS?!! I see 2 more posts coming: “Twitter Add Hotmail Import feature” & “Twitter Add Yahoo Import feature” !!!

  9. Don Wilson

    August 26th, 2007 at 9:48 pm

    This is news? I bought a script recently that allows me to do this, as well as import yahoo email, msn, hotmail, etc easily.

  10. Akil

    August 26th, 2007 at 9:56 pm

    Hey Don (#9) which one did you buy? I ‘m looking for one

  11. Don Wilson

    August 26th, 2007 at 10:19 pm

    Akil - http://svetlozar.net/page/Impo.....-cURL.html

  12. sc

    August 26th, 2007 at 10:21 pm

    I am curious as to why this is a big deal.

  13. LeoTheMaster

    August 26th, 2007 at 10:35 pm

    thx for info

  14. james

    August 26th, 2007 at 10:44 pm

    Wow, wonder how much VC money was burned to add this staggeringly original feature.

  15. Slappenstance

    August 26th, 2007 at 10:49 pm

    Seriously. Why is this being posted? Maybe you should post every new feature that every website adds so we can have more thrilling stories like this.

  16. David Catalano

    August 27th, 2007 at 5:39 am

    Akil, another contact web importer is by a company called Octazen (.com by the same name). They have one in .Net and PHP and it imports all of the major email address books plus many non-major ones. Even better is the fact that they provide free updates for X months as companies like Gmail or Yahoo or AOL change their code. Seems much more legit than the one recommended by Don although I can’t say that I’ve used the one he’s mentioned. I’ve used the Octazen one on several projects and it has worked great.

    And I’d like to echo the sentiments above. Seems like another ill-informed or pointless DR editorial. I have a fix! Just filter your feeds to EXCLUDE any that have
    Duncan Riley in them.

  17. David Catalano

    August 27th, 2007 at 5:49 am

    ^ search in the dc:creator tag

  18. Jimi

    August 27th, 2007 at 6:27 am

    Hey, I found it interesting and important enough to be reported.

  19. no thanks

    August 27th, 2007 at 9:28 am

    Twitter is useless and not original, regardless of all the hype.

  20. jim cherry

    August 27th, 2007 at 9:45 am

    @ David Catalano
    Thanks for the recommendation. That’s what we’ve been looking for.

  21. SFMike

    August 27th, 2007 at 11:29 am

    Is twitter the most annoying/useless web 2.0 service ever? I mean, who cares?

  22. Brian

    August 27th, 2007 at 1:27 pm

    nonews.com allows you to import contacts from gmail, yahoo, outlook and AOL…

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