Twitter Contact Linking in Windows Phone Mango

This confused me a little bit from the get go, but it turns out I had made it harder on myself without realizing it. When I turned on the Twitter integration on Windows Phone Mango, the first thing I noticed is that now my people tile was full of contact photos from Twitter. I don’t follow that many people (136), but all those people were now filling my contacts list. Just imaging what yours will look like! This was no good to me, so I filtered them out.

If you go into settings in the people hub, there is a button that says “filter my contact list”.

Tapping this lists all of the accounts that you have. I unclicked Twitter and, voila!, no more Twitter contacts in my contact list.

This does not mean that you can’t see Twitter updates on the “what’s new” tab. To make sure you’re seeing Twitter updates on the “what’s new” tab, click on “what’s new” and choose “Twitter” on the “show updates from” window.

What happened to me was, now that I didn’t have Twitter contacts in my list, I couldn’t see how to link a Twitter account to a phone account so that updates would show up in their tile. This is where it turns out I was not looking closely. In your Twitter feed on the “what’s new” tab, clicking on the person’s name will bring up that contact card. Clicking on the post itself will show you that post. That’s where I got confused.

Slide over to “profile” and there in the app bar is the “link” button that allows you to link contacts just like you could in all other accounts.

Had I not removed Twitter from my list of contacts I could have found the contact in the list and done the contact link normally. I don’t have a Facebook account, but I assume the process is the same for that.