I created a Twitter account this weekend and I am definitely underwhelmed with the de facto micro blogging service. I quickly registered my mobile and sent out my first “tweet.” The next step was to find some of my friends to follow. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just click on the Find People link and start searching.” Nope. You can search by email address but, if you can believe it, there currently is no way to search for people by name on Twitter. The site offers to search your webmail account for Twitter contacts. It found none in mine which wasn’t surprising considering I don’t keep my contacts in Gmail and many of my friends have multiple email addresses.

I find it completely mind-boggeling that Twitter allows no searching by name, something that I thought was fundamental to a social networking site. And I’m not the only one. I’m not sure what Twitter’s business strategy is, if they have one. What I am sure of is that they need to do a better job of keeping their user-base happy if they hope to grow. As for me, there’s probably lots of interesting people out there I could be following (getting Twitter updates from), but I might never know.