Finding people on Twitter

After I got my new sidebar widget working, I thought I’d go and see if any more of my friends were listed on Twitter, and discovered to my chagrin that they have elected to remove the “search for people” function on Twitter.  It’s been replaced by an “Allow Twitter to Rifle Your Rolodex” function where it looks to see if anyone you know is on twitter – and then does the super annoying Facebook-like list of everyone who isn’t enTwittered yet – “These losers haven’t signed up yet.  Spam them for us!”  Yeah, no.  

Two third party folks have made cool applications to replace this functionality.  Neither is perfect (and they’re both pretty overwhelmed), but they’re better than nothing.  You can find people with the name of at twitterdir, and you can find friends-of-friends at twubble.  I had a lot of fun futzing with the latter this morning. </div>
Your other alternative is to google “site:twitter.com Kirsten Jones”
Note that if you play with twubble for too long, Twitter will throttle you, and you’ll end up with no functionality for your cool sidebar widget thing for an hour while you contemplate the error of your ways.