Last Friday, news hit that Michael Abbott, Palm’s head of software and services, the man in charge of its webOS platform, was leaving the company. The news, which broke via a regulatory filing, made waves because it further highlighted Palm’s vulnerable position — the company’s stock price has been plummeting in recent months and it’s now attempting to find a buyer. The same filing revealed Palm’s plan to get high level employees to stick around: lucrative retention packages in the case of a sale. Apparently, Abbott wanted nothing to do with that. He must have had a good reason. Now we know why.

Abbott will be joining Twitter as the company’s new vice president of engineering, we’ve learned and confirmed with the company. To make room, Twitter’s current VP of engineering, Greg Pass, is being promoted to chief technology officer — becoming the first person to hold the CTO title for the fast-growing company.

Pass came over to Twitter as a part of  the Summize acquisition (now known as Twitter Search) almost two years ago. He was previously the CTO (and co-founder) of Summize, and before that was a system architect at AOL and co-founded ToFish. Obviously, the Summize acquisition has worked out well for Twitter, as search is now a key part of the service, and is leading the way in the company’s push to start making money — Promoted Tweets will at first rely completely on Twitter Search.

Abbott, meanwhile, was previously the general manager for .NET online services at Microsoft. Prior to that, he co-founded Passenger Inc and founded Composite Software. But obviously the Palm gig was his big one as he’s the man who introduced webOS to the world. And while it may have not saved Palm, pretty much everyone agrees that the software was innovative, and the best part of the Pre.

Twitter continues to build up one hell of a team.

[photo: flickr/jeffrey j schwartz]

Crunchbase

• TWITTER

Company: Twitter

Website: twitter.com

Launch Date: March 21, 2006

Funding: $1.16B

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

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