Twitter 'Acquires' Team Behind Fluther, Leaves the Q&A Site Intact

Twitter has been growing, fast, and it's been in need of more hands on deck for quite a while now. Though it's one of the hottest startups on the web, engineering talent is on high demand these days, so Twitter is resorting to something quite common lately, a "talent acquisition."

Twitter has "acquired" the team behind Fluther, a Q&A site. The interesting part though is that Twitter is not actually buying the company, it's just hiring all the people working for it.

"There are now three times as many people on the Twitter team as there were at this time last year. More than half of our employees work in engineering and operations, and those teams continue to grow," Twitter wrote.

"Today, we’re adding four engineers and one designer through our acquisition of the team at Fluther, Inc. During our conversations with Fluther's team, we were continually impressed by their technical talent, entrepreneurial spirit, and much of the thinking behind the question-and-answer product they’ve spent the last couple of years building," it announced.

Fluther is a social questions-and-answers site that's been in the works for the past couple of years or so. The people working on it though will now join Twitter and there will be no more active development of Fluther. The site and service will remain live and there will be a community manager to maintain it.

Growing companies buying smaller startups to feed their need for manpower is nothing new, Google and Facebook do it on a regular basis. However, most of the time, this involves buying the actual company, along with the product and assets.

But Twitter is not shelling out anything for a site it has nothing to do with. It may be a better alternative than buying it and shutting it down, like both web giants mentioned previously have a history of doing, but it still means that Fluther is dead in the long run.