A Wish for Better Twitter and Address Book Integration

There are people I follow on Twitter that I know in real life (most of them in fact). And there are times when I'd like to be able to directly contact them in response to a tweet, but in a longer format.

There is no way to do that right now. We need better integration with Address Book. I'm hoping that -a promising new Twitter desktop client for Mac OS X- will provide something like this.

What I'd propose is that Desktop Twitter clients allow you to add a new URL field to an address book entry, with the custom label "Twitter" (as shown in the image below). That URL would point to your Twitter profile page, such as http://www.twitter.com/sanguish.

Clients could easily pull up the names of all the people you know who use twitter and (with permission) add them to your stream.

Alternatively, as you follow people, you could relate their Twitter names to their address book. This would give you the option of always showing their real name, emailing them directly, always showing a picture you have set, etc.

It combines Twitter and your own personal list of Address Book people in a more complete way.

If nothing else, I've started adding this information to my own address book with the hope that someone might just might adopt it.