When you’re logged into Twitter’s web interface, you can find your friends on Twitter by their email address from https://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_contacts…but only if you have saved their email information in Gmail, Yahoo, AOL or LinkedIn. Twitter doesn’t offer an option to upload and search your Outlook contacts. However, you can easily upload your Outlook contacts to a place Twitter can check them to find your friends.
Four steps and you’re done
Here’s what you do. Don’t worry—it’s actually pretty simple, just four steps:
- Click here to get a free gmail account to put your contacts into for Twitter to scan. This is really fast and easy, so don’t be put off by it. Just use any nonsense name, but remember the username and password you create! (You can also use an existing gmail account, if you want to merge your Outlook contacts into it.)
- Click here to download and install Google’s free new tool to export/upload your contacts into Gmail. Also much easier than you might expect. It also offers to upload your calendar and email, but deselect those options—they will fail anyway unless you are using and are familiar with an existing Google Apps account (which are different than Gmail accounts).
- Run the tool to put your contacts into your new Gmail account. Now make sure you’re logged into Twitter.com and click here to go to Twitter’s find friends from contacts page.
- Put in your new Gmail email address (UsernameYouMadeUp@gmail.com) and password into the boxes and click “Find Friends.” You’re done!
A big reason we started this blog was to be able to provide more detailed answers to the Twitter questions we get. @Amy Willis was the most recent person to ask us this question:
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I think if this was generally known, Twitter would be more popular. Seriously, Microsoft Outlook is one VERY popular program! I’ll bet the majority of people on Twitter have someone’s email address that they don’t know is one Twitter, and would follow if they could find them by that email address.
There is a convenience to having a web based email, like if your away for a while and can’t always drag out the laptop….You can get on it from a mobile device….So if you have had your outlook forever and your thinking you don’t have to, have it….Think about the convenience and google accounts are quite versatile, you can use it for YouTube, Blogger, Orkut and many more.
I probably should have made Gmail a recommendation, shouldn’t I? I love both Outlook and Gmail, but I’m trying to migrate everything to Gmail—it really has a lot of advantages over Outlook. And I say that having used both of them for many years—I took advantage of an invitation to Gmail years ago when they were just getting started
{ 1 trackback }