While the rest of the tech world is focused on dueling announcements from Apple at WWDC and Microsoft at E3, Twitter quietly picked up one of the technical pioneers of the Web 2.0 movement, Akash Garg, a cofounder of Hi5.com in 2002, who most recently held the position of CTO at Bebo, where he worked for almost a year, starting in July of 2010. Upon joining Bebo, he was quoted as thinking of the company "as a startup". Now at Twitter, he's got one that more closely fits the label.Credited with developing the technology behind Hi5's growth to more than 250 million registered members (per LinkedIn), Akash paralleled decisions made by other fast-growing companies of the time, including SixApart, Google and others by leveraging low cost commodity hardware to deliver a highly scalable, highly available system - something Twitter is getting increasingly better at after years of spotty uptime.
Twitter's communications team confirmed his hire, saying only that he is an engineer on the Platform team at the company. Last Friday, a colleague, Sabrina Bruning, in community management at Bebo, posted a photo from a goodbye on his last day at Bebo (See the tweet along with Foursquare photo) and he was added to Twitter's Team list this morning, an informal way to track the comings and goings of Twitter's fast-expanding roster.
In addition to his work at Bebo and Hi5, Akash is a mentor to 500startups and i/o Ventures.