I had this same issue. I googled it and found the answer. The short of it is use the app friendcaster. You can sync the account with your contact list as well with this app.
This isn't an issue, I believe Google disabled the ability to do this but I can't tell you why. Ways around this are using an app like friendcaster or haxsync. Some ROM's have this fixed so you don't even need an alternate app or anything.