Download Squad

Social networks are certainly popular and useful these days, but if there's one annoyance they've created it would have to be the abundance of unsolicited emails that they produce. Unlike spam, which is unsolicited email for products and services you have nothing to do with, many are referring to the emails generated by social networks and the like as "bac'n". Basically, it's a more legitimate form of unsolicited email because you have some sort of relationship with the host service.

Most of these services grow in large part by finding ways to engineer their users into inviting as many friends as possible. In Twitter's case, the only way to find out if one of your friends is using the service is to send them an invitation. While I'm sure this is quite effective for Twitter, it's also a bit nasty.

If you've been hesitant to spam, sorry, "bac'n" your friends with signup requests for Twitter (a service they may have little or no interest in), you might be happy to learn that some enterprising individuals have generated TwitterSearch. With TwitterSearch you can enter a list of email addresses, and it will return links to each person's Twitter page that it can find.

This is a tool that really ought to be built in to Twitter, and it should be able to link in to your email address book the same way Facebook and other social tools do. In fact, it probably will, sooner or later.

[via Mashable]