14 DAY TRIAL // Despite some ups and downs, Twitter's future is still looking pretty good and the site is nowhere near its goal of one billion users. So, in anticipation of another flood of users, the site has been hiring like crazy, doubling the number of employees in half a year. Twitter has now reached the 140-employee mark, as cofounder Biz Stone announced, a symbolic number considering Twitter's famous 140-character limit.
In keeping with the site's trademark simplicity, the announcement was short and straightforward, "today we are celebrating our 140th employee at Twitter!" tweeted Stone. Now, just because Twitter chose this number to mark its growth doesn't mean that it has any plans of stopping - the company wants to bring in quite a few new people, 26 at the moment, based on the listings on the site's jobs page.
Certainly not the size of Facebook, Twitter is still pretty big after the huge influx of new users in the first half of 2009. Having grown by an order of magnitude in just one year, it's clear that Twitter needed to ramp up hires to keep up. And, while user growth leveled off sometime in the summer, its hiring spree had only just begun. Twitter had about 60 to 70 employees at the end of last summer, half the number it has today.
Most of the hires have been in the technical department, where most of the currently open positions are available too, which badly needed some boosting. The site has been rather (in)famous for its frequent outages especially in the early days.
While the fail whale was part of Twitter's quirky charm, and forgivable for a small startup with no revenue and little funding, now that it has secured well over 100 million in funding and reaches tens of millions of people, users aren't so willing to cut it some slack. Thankfully, Twitter doesn't go down that often, though when it does, everyone notices, but it's still going to need all the engineers it can get if it wants to maintain its rich and diverse third-party development community.