The advent of a new week regularly means the addition of new employees to Twitter, and as is common, the much-discussed ambitious microblogging powerhouse is draining the intellectual coffers of larger Valley titans. Today, the company welcomes three more to its team, two of whom call Google their last stop. One of the adds was most recently the lead product manager for "Watch and Discovery" at YouTube.The three new hires include Jacob Thornton (@jacobthornton), Brian Larson (@balarson) and Shiva Rajaraman (@shivalr). Their hires bring the total number of people followed by Twitter's team list to 191, which we've been told includes contractors and other friends of the company.
Jacob Thornton (LinkedIn | Twitter) was most recently listed as a product designer for Threadsy, a unified social messaging startup that was a participant at TechCrunch50 in 2009. Jacob, a social media app designer, worked on the front-end for Threadsy, and his departure is likely the reason that Threadsy is looking to hire a front-end Web site and HTML ninja. (Given the job was posted 2 weeks ago and his start date is today, it seems more than coincidence)
In parallel, Jacob also is behind the project somelemonade, a visual reader for Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and Vimeo. That side project recently crossed 500 users. He joins Twitter as a release engineer.
Obligatory First Day Tweetage from Jacob
Shiva Rajaraman (LinkedIn | Twitter) was the senior product manager at YouTube for Watch and Discovery, where he was in place since September 2006, a month prior to Google's $1.65 billion acquisition. Shiva joins Twitter as a product manager focused on monetization.
Brian Larson (Twitter | Google Profile) is most recently of Google. Prior to joining Google, Brian picked up a computer science master's degree from Stanford, and co-authored a paper on distributed recovery from attacks on peer to peer systems (see PDF) in 2002. He joins Twitter as a software engineer on the search team.