Twitter’s hiring binge brings it to 140 employees

Twitter has been on a hiring spree as of late, grabbing up employees left and right for its engineering and business development teams.

The company just crossed the symbolic 140-employee mark, mirroring its famous character limit for tweets, according to co-founder Biz Stone. On Twitter’s job page, there are at least 27 openings, primarily on the technical side. Fresh off a funding round last fall that valued the company at $1 billion, Twitter now has the cash and clout to attract new hires.

So who has Twitter grabbed as of late? Robin Sloan, who handled strategy at Al Gore’s Current TV; a few developers, Michael Busch and Dan Webb; and a user interface designer Mark Otto, among others. They also hired Alexa Lee, who used to produce videos for VentureBeat. There are many, many others but the hiring pace represents a level unseen at the company. During the summer in July and August, the company had between 60 and 70 employees.

On one other positive note, the site may have broken out of its lull in terms of users. Comscore reported earlier today that Twitter’s web site attracted 73.5 million unique individuals in January, up 8 percent from the previous month. That’s only a partial measure of the service’s overall traffic because it doesn’t incorporate users from external clients like Brizzly or mobile users. After a couple months of stagnant growth last fall, there was concern that Twitter might remain a niche product especially after adaptations by Facebook and now Google’s entrant into the space, Buzz.