Twitter Triples Team in One Year, Acqhires Q&A Start-Up

Twitter announced today it has acquired the talent behind Fluther, a Web Q&A product, in order to beef up its efforts to help users discover content. Twitter specifically said this is a talent acquisition of four engineers and one designer, and that the Fluther product will remain independent, though mostly unmaintained.

Twitter execs have often expressed a desire to improve their relevancy and discovery efforts so that the service’s constant stream of updates does not overwhelm users. Now, long after stating the priority, they’ve hired a team to make that happen.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone had served as an adviser to Fluther, which had been backed with $600,000 in funding from angel investors including Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and FF Angel. Three-year-old Fluther had launched its own site, which focused on matching people with questions to experts with answers, as well as on a white-label tool for others to offer Q&A.

Along with announcing the acquisition, Twitter made the stunning disclosure that it now has three times as many employees as it had last year. The company said more than half its team is dedicated to engineering and operations.

Twitter has for most of its existence had plenty of funding, but it started staffing up seriously only in the past year or so, despite recurring problems with uptime. The company just raised $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation in a round led by Kleiner Perkins.