In February I wrote about Twitter’s escalating employee count, which was closing in on 400 members of staff. Way back in May 2009 – when Twitter was black and white and mostly made out of wood – that number was just 69 (dude).

Now, just three and a bit months later, Twitter’s roster has jumped by over 25%, and is about to hit 500.

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Would you be surprised to hear that Twitter employees use official Twitter apps to send and read their tweets much more often than the general public? Probably not, but that’s what Business Insider found after looking into just how Twitter employees actually used Twitter.
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It looks like Twitter has enticed yet another former Microsoft employee over to its team: Alek Kotcz, Principle Scientist at Microsoft’s Bing search engine appears to have left Bing for Twitter. Although this is still in rumor phase, there are several indications that Kotcz has joined the Twitter team, and we expect this to be made official in the coming days.
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Twitter currently has 27 job vacancies.

In what, you ask? Pretty much everything, including administration, analytics, business development, media, engineering, internationalization, IT & website operations, API, research, design and search.

You can basically take your pick. It’s all part of the big expansion towards profitability that Biz Stone talked about back in November.

And if you want to know why you might like to work at Twitter, you can read the pitch here.

(Thanks to @Hulkster1970 for the scoop.)

You’re a huge, global brand, and you’re on Twitter. You have lots of support employees on the network, and sensibly you’ve each allocated them a @name_company or @company_name username (i.e., ASOS_james). You have a unit working under your name, and they’re doing good things.

One of your employees becomes the real star of the team, and gets tens of thousands of followers over many months, offering fantastic support and just enough personality to be a hit. He starts getting a lot of attention.

Then one day, suddenly, he quits.

What now?

Some things to consider:

1. Do you allow him to announce in his (current) Twitter account that he’s moving to another company, even if it’s a rival?
2. Do you let another employee take over the account? And do you do this on the sly, or do you make it public knowledge?
3. Do you rename the account, allocating it to another employee? What about those 50,000 followers – how are they going to react knowing their superstar is no longer in charge?
4. Do you let the person running the account rename it, and take it over, doing with it as they will?
5. Or do you just close the account? What about all those cases they solved, and help they gave? There’s a history there.

This is going to be a big deal in the future. I can see lawyers getting involved deciding who really ‘owns’ the tweets on employee accounts – or even the account itself. Yes, you’re tweeting on company time using company resources, but it’s your personality that’s made that account a success. It’s you that nurtured those followers, and it’s you that turned them into clients. When star salespeople leave companies, they often take clients with them. Indeed, their clients want to go. Why should it be any different on Twitter?

If you’re an individual like Jeremiah Owyang that moves his essentially personal account between companies, then it’s less of a problem. Owyang is the account. He takes it with him when he leaves. This perhaps seems like the right way forward, but it’s not necessarily best practice for companies to let employees use their personal accounts for work (and vice versa). And both lose the advantages of being associated with the brand name.

It becomes significantly less clear about what is the right thing to do – in both the contractual and ethical sense – if somebody becomes a superstar on Twitter using their work-only account, and then leaves. By association, the company becomes a superstar, too, particularly if the individual is being applauded for great support, and the ramifications of what happens when he or she quits (or, daresay, is fired) are considerable.

And as such, it might be worth thinking about the inevitability of that future now, as opposed to when it actually happens. Because believe me, it will.

TweepML allows you to build lists of Twitter users that you can recommend to friends and followers. Better, if they like what they see, they can follow everybody – or as many as they like from the list – with a single click.

I’ve created a list from my article about the people who work at Twitter, and you can follow these folks quickly and easily by visiting this page.

Why not take a moment to create your own lists, and recommend them to your friends. It’s got to be better than #followfriday, right?

Lots of people have multiple accounts on Twitter, for various reasons. I can’t tell you the number of times I get a message from somebody out of the blue and I’ll think, “Hey, I know you, don’t I?”

But who is it?

Some detective work later, I figure out that the reason I know this person is because I’m following one of their other accounts. Perhaps their business account. Maybe their personal one. What bugs me about this is I might have a friendly relationship with this person on one of their accounts, but have no idea who they are on another. Or even that they have another.

What I’d like Twitter to offer (and this would be entirely opt-in) is a way for multiple accounts to be linked together. This would be great for businesses that have main accounts and lots of additional ones for their staff. Like Twitter themselves, for example. When you visit the Twitter profile, all their employees should be right there, too. With titles and responsibilities. And if I stumble across an individual employee, it shows that they’re linked to Twitter.

(Think Twitter + LinkedIn.)

Some people do this now in their bios, but it’s kinda awkward, and doesn’t translate well into manageable data.

It could even work a bit like a newsfeed, with one main account pulling the updates from everybody else. So, if I wanted to really follow Google, for example, an @GoogleTeam user could be setup so that everybody who worked for the company could be followed via that one account. The different users would feed in and I could reply to them accordingly.

(Think Twitter + RSS.)

And it wouldn’t have to stop at businesses. Participants in sports teams could link together, as well as social groups and other clubs. You could start your own tribe.

(It might even come with privacy. You could direct message everybody in your tribe with one click. Wouldn’t that be convenient?)

As it is, it’s awkward to find out all the people that work for any corporation on Twitter. I’ve been trying to do this for Twitter themselves, and Dave Winer is doing some great work with his 100twt project. (Check out what the people who work for the New York Times are saying.)

I’d like to see it automated. I think it benefits businesses and customers, which is rare enough to make it very worthwhile.

In May I wrote a fairly popular article entitled, “47 People Who Work At Twitter (And What They Do)“.

Today I’ve updated this list and Twitter’s employee team has now grown to 67 individuals, many of whom have been added to the support staff, as well as operations and media.

Check out the staff roster here.

UPDATE: This list was last updated on September 10, 2009. Users that are no longer in Twitter’s list of employees have been preserved within this page but their entry has been reformatted with a strikethrough. Also note there are a couple of people on this list who work at Twitter but are not yet on Twitter’s about page. Yeah, I’m confused too. Please contact me with any corrections (proof is desirable).

TIP: To save time, you can follow everybody who works at Twitter (with just one click) by visiting the page I created at TweepML.

The shenanigans of the past couple of days on Twitter have provided us with a couple of key pieces of information: one, that Twitter really needs to work on its PR, and two, that the leadership provided by Jack Dorsey (@Jack), Evan Williams (@Ev), Biz Stone (@Biz) and others, certainly in the manner of what they blog and tweet, is perhaps not as good as it might be.

Here’s the thing: while these guys are holding the reins, they aren’t the only employees Twitter has. Moreover, while we’re often enthusiastically told that Twitter is operated by a staff of just 30 people – even Twitter themselves blogged this a month or two back – according to my research, they actually have 69 individuals on the payroll, in some form or another.

How did I determine this? I looked at their about page. I urge you to do the same. However, while this provides a quick way to access these folk, it doesn’t tell you an awful lot about them. Nor, in the majority of cases, do their respective bios.

Here, then, in alphabetical order (by first name), is a list of the people who work for Twitter including, with official confirmation where possible, details of what they do. If you have an interest in keeping up-to-speed with all developments on the network, you might find following some of these accounts of enormous benefit. Indeed, from what I have seen, many of these guys are more open and communicative about changes within Twitter than their esteemed leaders.

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