Twitter is trying to make it easier to find people you already know on Facebook and LinkedIn by improving its Find Friends section, which now looks to have been blocked by Facebook.

Nice moves by Twitter — now if could just stay up for long enough we could all take advantage of these new options to connect.

The move kind of squares the social circle a little more and builds on the immense popularity of Twitter’s three year old Facebook app.

Twitter’s Facebook app is already heavily used (it has more than seven million users) and it now shows which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter and lets you follow them instantly or save them to a list.

The save them to a list feature (this is private btw) is a really neat little touch. It is recognition that you might not want to follow all of your Facebook friends on Twitter, but can still keep tabs on them — you know if you’re a tab keeper.

Other changes Twitter has made to its Facebook app include the ability to allow people to post tweets to your Facebook profile and to various Facebook pages as well. Again all helping to spread push that Twitter social graph.

Facebook problem

Not long after the app update was launched Twitter said “The Facebook app cannot currently access your Facebook friend list. We believe this is an issue on Facebook’s end”.

However, after that Twitter issued another update and said it had been notified by Facebook that the app update had been blocked. Twitter says it is working with Facebook to resolve the issue.

For its part Facebook says that it will release more details later. Is this Facebook getting proprietorial? It wouldn’t be unheard of. It has never been keen on rivals getting a slice of its action.

It is interesting that this happens as Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg says in an interview with Inside Facebook that Twitter’s exponential growth is over.

“It just turned out that that their [Twitter] growth rate was kind of unnatural. They got a lot of media attention, and it grew very quickly for a little period of time.  Most of the lessons I take away from the whole thing now are that, as good as I think they are, I think I personally just paid too much attention to it.”

LinkedIn, which has been making changes of its own this week — see post, also gets a look in with the Tweets application that allows you to see which of your LinkedIn connections are on Twitter and follow the ones you choose right from the app.

For me at least that is almost more useful than the Facebook tie-up as I’m more likely to follow people I know on LinkedIn on Twitter than those I know on Facebook. Twitter and LinkedIn are more complimentary for me.

The app also lets you save your LinkedIn connections as a list, post your Tweets to LinkedIn, and add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile.

The day it announced all this it was suffering more outages that it said last week should be over in two weeks. Fingers crossed.

The outages have been not been helped by the heavy tweeting that the World Cup has driven.

It makes you forget what a small company Twitter still is (about two hundred staff), but with a powerful global reach that attracts the powerful. That was underscored yesterday as President Medvedev of Russia visited its office on a tour of Silicon Valley (Apple and Cisco were also on his itinerary) during which he made his inaugural tweet on the @KremlinRussia account.