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.
are you transcribing Fred Wilson’s blog over to Techcrunch now, Duncan?
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.
This doesn’t seem like a newsworthy feature, just my opinion. That’s probably the reason it was overlooked.
Who gives a damn?!
eli
no, but the quote summed up what Fred (an investor) thought about it.
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…
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.
Duncan.. Is this NEWS?!! I see 2 more posts coming: “Twitter Add Hotmail Import feature” & “Twitter Add Yahoo Import feature” !!!
This is news? I bought a script recently that allows me to do this, as well as import yahoo email, msn, hotmail, etc easily.
Hey Don (#9) which one did you buy? I ‘m looking for one
Akil – http://svetloza...g-PHP-cURL.html
I am curious as to why this is a big deal.
thx for info
Wow, wonder how much VC money was burned to add this staggeringly original feature.
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.
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.
^ search in the dc:creator tag
Hey, I found it interesting and important enough to be reported.
Twitter is useless and not original, regardless of all the hype.
@ David Catalano
Thanks for the recommendation. That’s what we’ve been looking for.
Is twitter the most annoying/useless web 2.0 service ever? I mean, who cares?
nonews.com allows you to import contacts from gmail, yahoo, outlook and AOL…