In a time of widespread economic downturn, a number of companies powering a new form of communication are bulking up their teams with new staff. Twitter, its leading open source competitor Laconi.ca and the high-profile enterprise service Yammer have all made new hires or announced hires coming in the past week. We’re tracking hires in this sector over on our new site, Jobwire.
This growth makes sense given the rush of new users these companies must be experiencing. It’s not just growing hype, either. The combination of collaboration, intelligence gathering and ease of use make micro-messaging or micro-blogging a compelling addition to millions of peoples’ work and personal lives.
Mainstream Media Love
The huge audiences of old school media outfits are getting regular introductions to Twitter these days. CNN’s Rick Sanchez frequently interacts with his thousands of Twitter friends while discussing current events on his show. Newsweek featured Twitter messages prominently on the front page of its website during election day. The Wall St. Journal says that Twitter is now mainstream. That’s getting harder and harder to deny.
We wrote on Monday about the Toronto Globe and Mail’s decision to move star technology reporter Mathew Ingram into an online community manager role, including being responsible for getting the newspaper better integrated with communities on Twitter.
It appears that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, also the founder of paradigm shattering Blogger.com, now has another epochal hit on his hands. The company has received several rounds of venture funding and announced this week that it’s getting ready to expand its staff again with more new hires.
It’s Not Just Twitter
There’s a whole slew of microblogging services to choose from. We wrote about a comparative survey of just the ones useful for business users, earlier this week. The market leader in that emerging field may be Yammer, who report that more than 10 thousand businesses have had Yammer networks set up for employees or co-workers. According to an update from LinkedIn, Yammer recently brought another senior staff member over from parent company Geni. Just like Twitter was an off-shot of startup Odeo, Geni may end up eclipsed by Yammer.
A different but related animal is open source microblogging service Laconi.ca. We wrote enthusiastically about this company the day it went live. It’s hard to know how many Laconi.ca installs are up and running, but this tiny company just quadrupled its staff this week with its first three full time hires.
We’ll be watching for more growth news from companies in this sector but all indications now are that this is a communication paradigm making a rapid ascent and there are business decisions being made that demonstrate that.
