People Search is Disabled. Can't find my Friends!

Well, for those of us that don't use webmail as a primary form of email communication... the ability to import a .csv from a standalone email client would be appreciated. The fact that you can only apparently import contacts from a webmail client is mind-boggling to me personally.

If importation via .csv is possible, I sure can't find it and would sure appreciate any assistance in the procedure to do so. :)

You forgot to mention how this feature has been broken for over 9 months. My previous problem report on this (non)satisfaction site was "redirected" by Twitter to avoid anyone seeing how long this has been broken. Is there ANY feature that isn't "temporarily" disabled all the time? Pathetic

Alternatives for User Search that might help in the meantime:

1. To search by topic, try http://search.twitter.com

2. To find friends through the address book of your webmail account, try http://twitter.com/invitations

The above are Twitter features. There are also third-party services that may help:

3. To search by name or bio, try http://twitdir.com or http://tweetscan.com/usersearch.php or http://twellow.com

4. To search by location, try http://twitterlocal.net

5. To search by profession, try http://twitterpacks.pbwiki.com

6. To search for companies that use Twitter, try http://www.socialbrandindex.com/twitter

Ok. But how am I then gonna add friends to my list? I'm not usinng any kind of webmail so that option won't work for me..

blablabla !!!!!!
for days, for weeks...I am waiting

Twitter tells us that :
1/he can not manage his users' database
2/he wants only NEW subscribers without paying attention to the CURRENT members !

Not fair, not usefull : I will an other (serious) micro-blogging platform

I'm really angry about this. I want to find new and exciting people on twitter because I only have like 3 friends on here. Nobody I invite seems to want to join. So how am I supposed to find new people?

So far, with this and the SMS problem, I'm starting to hate this site. It's just so fun, though. :'(

I have somehow managed to find followers & people to follow with the missing function.
Have you tried the options offered above by "mdy"

All I want to do is add Guy Kawasaki to my twitter. How am I supposed to do that??? I don't have his email address, but he's one of the most prominent people out there. And I want to follow NPR to get news- I don't even have their email. How do I do this NOW?

Just what I needed to get around it. Thank you Eric!

If you already know a friend's Twitter Username:

Simply go to http://twitter.com/Username and click the Follow button beneath Username's icon.

Once you've done that, click Username's following or followers links and look out for anyone else you know.

Click their icons too, and follow them if you wish.

That's roughly how I started on Twitter, since many of my contacts were already following each other.

Even though User Search worked back then, I didn't really bother with it: most users I wanted to follow hadn't taken the trouble to indicate their town or even their country, so User Search just couldn't find them.

[Cross-posted from http://gsfn.us/t/n5q#reply_663450]

Thanks Eridanus, I especially like this sentence 'We hope to bring out a more stable (and better) version - but not before 2010.' LOL or should I be crying ... still a lot of work to do for Twitter if you ask me ...

So why the heck can't twitter put THIS NOTICE there and say it as it is! and SIMPLY remove the button ! Does it take a genius of a Webmaster to do so ?

I signed up for twitter at the prodding of a close friend, who I do not email as we have mobiles and facebook for that. She gave me her twitter name and lauded how she has multitudes of followers all over the world and how much fun it was, etc.
Yay, I have one friend here and can't search to find new people?
Yeah, until this is miraculously fixed, navigating away from the site is too much trouble. Twitter should have made this a priority as the social networking is it's BASIC REASON FOR EXISTANCE.
Yeah, this is one website I'm giving an enormous thumbs down. Now, time to figure out how to disable my account... or is that down indefinitely, too?

genevieve:

Finding new people is really easy, even without the disabled User Search facility (which never helped me much, anyway). Just take the trouble to read through the following links:

• If you already know one friend's Twitter Username

• Alternatives for User Search.

No webmail to import names from, I do not know the email addresses of the people I would like to get back in touch with, I have no clue who is on twitter = no way to get any use out of Twitter.com.

It is sad that you disabled the primary feature which alllows new legit users connect with others. You cannot be serious that you are not going to re-enable this featuer in the near future. Sounds to me like someone needs to get working in the scripting lab and work out a fix for this (or hire someone who knows better).

Good luck with a social networking and blogging site that doesn't allow either for new users............Unless of course you like reading your own posts! Maybe you guys will wake up and smell the burning coffee one day.....it has already passed the grinding point and has started to brew. How about pour yourself a cup and fix this!

Frustrated Phodel looking for an alternate to Facebook per referral of LeoLAP!

Hi Todd. If you had decided to sign up for Twitter because of Leo Laporte (hope I didn't misunderstand that part), I think you might be better off looking at the people that Leo currently follows on Twitter, and seeing if any of them are also interesting to you.

To follow Leo:

1. Login to Twitter

2. Go to http://twitter.com/leolaporte

3. Click the "Follow" button that's in the upper left corner.

Then, to browse through the list of people that Leo currently follows:

1. Go to http://twitter.com/leolaporte/friends

2. For every person that you think is interesting in his list, click the "Follow" button next to their names.

3. When you get to the bottom of the first page, just click the "Next" button to see the next few pages.

After you've finished following people, you'll see the updates of everyone you've decided to follow on your home page at http://twitter.com/home

If you're the type who finds Leo interesting, I suspect you'll find a lot of interesting people in his list of friends. He only follows 512 people, while 60,000+ people are following him. Based on his follower-following ratio, I think it's safe to conclude that he's a bit selective about who he chooses to follow.

almost every function I try to use on twitter does not work or is disabled... Why should I use this site for anything? I can't add a picture (tried many times, with different size pictures, can't find people, etc.). What works?

You miss the value of People Search. It is not to import your friends (whose usernames you probably know) but to find people you don't know, people who live nearby or who are in the same line of work. It's especially important for new users who don't have a lot of people to follow when they first sign up. That's how I first found people when I signed up for Twitter last spring. It was invaluable.

I think even if some are abusing the system (what, exactly?) it is better to have some way to find people than nothing. I'd rather be contacted by the occasional spammer than to not have People Search enabled.

Part of my frustration is that I've posted about several issues on Get Satisfaction regarding Twitter and never, ever have I seen someone from Twitter respond to any of them. They've outsourced customer support to their own customers.

I really don't know what they do all day at Twitter because it seems like it gets less and less functional and they don't respond to their own users. It's only because there isn't a good alternative (yet!) that people have stuck with Twitter. They are a success in spite of themselves and their indifferent attitude towards their users.

I appreciate the workaround solutions proposed, I do. But even more I'd like to see someone from Twitter respond to user's problems on Get Satisfaction and no depend on other users to explain Twitter's problems to their fellow users.

So when will the new people search be available?

Everyday I go to the status page and twitter always has problems daily and sometime some features aren't available and then they remove some features or disable them. I guess twitter will never be fixed. Obviously it isn't a good website then if it has so many problems. Twitter = BIG FAIL!!!

that sux-hope you change it soon. How about letting us know by sending an email, or when you click on the link have a little notice, so that we know what's going..?

I added my name to the list of people wondering where the "Find People" feature went -- I keep wondering if by "abuse" you mean "Use in a way that makes sense to people?" sometimes we don't personally know [e.g. Jason Calicanis or Leo Laporte or Barack Obama,] but we'd like to be able to follow them anyway. And I tried clicking on a few user's "follow" button, and *that* feature doesn't work either now! There is no physical way for me to add users that are not personal acquaintances in Twitter anymore. As someone in this thread said, you've just taken away the one thing that was Twitter's raison d'etre.

Oh - and another thing that's broken - in trying to add a post to this thread I tried logging in to the forum with my Twitter credentials and the system didn't recognize my username and password, so I thought "maybe I changed my password and forgot it" so I just entered my username - AND IT DIDN"T RECOGNIZE THAT EITHER, EVEN THOUGH I AM SIGNED IN WITH EXACTLY THE SAME CREDENTIALS/USERNAME. I signed in with my email address, and it said it created a new account for me - I'm going to check - but I hope it hasn't overwritten my existing account.

There is seriously something wrong with twitter that goes beyond constant outages, it has scaled HORRIBLY. I wish you every success, but you've just killed your growth exponentially, new users and some existing ones will begin to abandon the platform very soon.