Twitter Names First CTO, Hires New VP Of Engineering

Twitter’s workforce grew in terms of both size and impressiveness this week.  The company has named its first CTO (promoting a current employee), and also hired someone away from Palm to act as its vice president of engineering.

Let’s start with the top-level move.  Greg Pass is actually Twitter’s old vice president of engineering – he held the role for about two years.  Before that, he served at Summize, AOL, and ToFish, and earned a degree from Cornell, as well.

Presumably, Pass wouldn’t be getting a promotion unless he’d done good work, so this change should benefit Twitter.  Pass’s advancement also helps Twitter in the sense that a tech company without a CTO is a sort of unusual creature.

As for the person who’s replacing Pass, Michael Abbott last worked as the senior vice president of software and services at Palm, and his LinkedIn profile puts him at Microsoft, Passenger, and Composite Software beforehand.  Plus, Abbott’s earned seven recommendations on the networking site.

It should be interesting to see if Twitter undergoes any significant technical changes as a result of these developments.  A hat tip goes to MG Siegler, in any case.