1,046 to be precise. Which means that the firm has been on a serious hiring spree.

Back in January, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that Twitter employed “about 900 people”. I’ve been tracking the company’s staff roster pretty closely for a number of years now and, by looking at the rate of employee acquisition since 2008, I concluded that Twitter should have been sorting out the paperwork for its 1,000th employee “within about six months”, which turned out to be a pretty good guess.

As I’ve said before, Twitter’s staff count is freely available on their employee page, which is updated very regularly. Right now, it’s showing 1,046 avatars. In my experience, this is a more reliable metric than the people that @Twitter is following (all employees, currently 1,041 follows) or @Twitter’s official team list (989 members).

Back in November of last year, Twitter employed 706 people, which means they’ve added 340 in the last seven months or so – an acquisition rate of about 48 people per month, or over 1.5 per day. That’s a pretty aggressive run, which is encouraging for Twitter bulls.

Anyway, here’s your money shot – the avatars of every single employee at Twitter. And as you can see, there’s still quite a lot of eggs.