Twitter announced Tuesday that the fledgling microblogging startup has hired its 300th full-time employee. Naturally, the announcement was made via Twitter.
“We just hired our 300th full-time employee. Wowza! cc: @JoinTheFlock.”
For comparison, Facebook has over 1,700 employeees and Zynga has 1,200 full-timers.
Not all technology startups are growing as healthily as Twitter. (Social bookmarking innovator Digg just announced a day ago a second major wave of employee layoffs.)
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company had just reached 140 employees back in February and, at the time of his transferring the CEO title to Dick Costolo, Evan Williams said the company had reached 300 workers. (The discrepancy may be between all employees and just full-time employees.)
The name copied in the tweet, @JoinTheFlock, is the official Twitter recruiting account. Twitter still has about 30 open positions listed across a variety of different teams, including business development & sales, engineering, and operations.
It’s almost too easy to speculate about the site’s future by looking at these openings. “Software Engineer – Android” should make Android users optimistic about an improved app, since we haven’t heard much on that front since the app launched in late April. The about page for “Software Engineer – Search (Asian Languages)” specifically highlights four languages–Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese–but no one in China should get too excited. Twitter hardly seems motivated to jump into a censorship imbroglio a la Google anytime soon.
Under the category of “Monetization,” we find one opening for “Software Engineer – Monetization.” One cannot help but wonder how many people make up the “Monetization” team at Twitter at the moment, if such a team even exists. With the successive launches of various experimental “Promoted Products” on the site, like Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets, the San Francisco startup seems to be getting serious about making its business profitable at a calm, slow pace.
