14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is starting off 2010 in force by announcing, more or less officially, 10 new hires to bolster its growing team and ambitions. The microblogging platform maintains lists of all of its employees which revealed that the company has been snatching up a number of people from big tech companies like Google and a couple of social networks like Ning and Bebo.
As blogger Louis Gray spotted, the biggest new hire seems to be Bakari Brock, a lawyer at Google and YouTube for the past couple of years who specializes in "in-house commercial practice focuses on negotiation and drafting of music, video and software licenses; and counseling on copyright, ecommerce, and general policy issues," as his LinkedIn profile describes.
His arrival could mean that Twitter was preparing some sort of move into content distribution, which would certainly justify the need for some in-house legal prowess, but this does seem a bit of a stretch for a company that has managed to maintain a rather focused interest. Twitter is about to provide a great service and a great API which third-parties can use to add any sort of embellishment they want. But, even if Twitter isn't doing anything in the content field itself, a huge amount of content does pass through the service every day and maybe the company is just playing it safe.
"Paul Soals (formerly of Bebo), Ed Ceaser (formerly of TiVo), Dmitriy Ryaboy (formerly of Cloudera), Nancy Broden (formerly of Qik), Tony Wang (also from Google), John Sirois (from VMWare), Jinen Kamdar (a second Ning escapee) and Jane Huang," Louis Gray lists Twitter's other new hires.
Very late last year, Twitter made another hiring swoop by acquiring Mixer Labs, a move which was clearly aimed at getting its hands on a very talented team specializing in a very interesting field for Twitter, geolocation. In all, Twitter's team list now counts 156 members, though this doesn't directly translate into the number of employees.