Twitter announced Tuesday that it has "acquired" the four engineers and a designer from a Q&A start-up called Fluther. Fluther won't shut down, the two companies explained; though development on it will not continue, a community manager will continue to maintain it.
The Fluther product itself was not acquired by Twitter, making this a different kind of talent acquisition from those that Facebook has been making famous lately. Facebook has acquired companies like Drop.io and Hot Potato specifically for the engineers or product leaders behind them, but in those cases also acquired the software itself and in most cases shut it down.
The former Fluther engineers, it seems, will be involved in content discovery technology on Twitter.
"During our conversations with Fluther's team, we were continually impressed by their technical talent, entrepreneurial spirit, and much of the thinking behind the question-and-answer product they've spent the last couple of years building," a post on the Twitter blog explained. "When the Fluther team joins us they will focus on helping users discover the most relevant content on Twitter."