I’m not sure Andy Beard will be a fan (had to slip that in there, Andy!), but you can now import your GMail contacts into Twitter to see who else has an account.  There’s also a recently implemented search feature for finding friends and contacts…

Twitter has finally added the feature they?ve needed from day one: the ability to import your contacts from another service. For now it is limited to just Gmail, which should apply to a large proportion of the service?s early adopter user base. Enter your email address and password to see which of your contacts are on Twitter, or manually invite people to join.

Twitter Adds GMail Contacts Import