Mike Davidson reserved a very special announcement for his 10,000th Tweet. Today, the co-founder and former CEO of Newsvine announced that he’s joining Twitter as vice president of design after more than five years working for msnbc.com.
Davidson plans to relocate to San Francisco where Twitter is headquartered, noting that the social media property has the “potential to be the most useful connected service in the world.”
“This is quite literally the only position at the only company in the only city that could have done it,” said Davidson of the decision to leave Seattle for Twitter’s HQ. He also reassures close followers of his blog and Twitter account that he’s keeping his newly-constructed modernistic home on Magnolia and his University of Washington Husky football season tickets.
Twitter recently opened a new engineering office in Seattle. It also just tapped another notable Seattle entrepreneur, hiring former Amazon.com developer and Robot Co-op founder Buster Benson in August.
Davidson’s departure from msnbc.com, which recently changed its name to NBCNews.com, comes at a time of transition for the media property. Last week, the company’s top exec, Charlie Tillinghast, and top editor, Jennifer Sizemore, announced that they were leaving the company.
Davidson is well respected in the technology realm for his design chops, and the University of Washington grad certainly has big media experience, having worked at both msnbc.com and ESPN. That should prove useful for Twitter, which is transforming how people share and consume news and information in real-time.
The vice president of design title is a new one, and Davidson writes in a blog post that he’s excited to take on the challenge. He notes that Twitter has morphed from a “little Internet CB radio” into “one of the most important platforms in the world.”
Twitter is at a crucial moment its own life, as well as in the evolution of information and media. It is not perfect, but it represents a new approach to information production, aggregation, and discovery. It’s the best window into how we will consume information in a society dominated by the computers we keep in our pockets and on our bedside tables. It already reaches over 140 million people in the world, and it’s only scratched the surface of what it could be and what it should be.
https://twitter.com/mikeindustries/status/255434166840221696
