Twitter Continues Talent Scoop, Takes Digg's UX Guy

candleIconFresh off their new $100 million funding round, Twitter continues to scoop up talent from around the web to expand operations. The latest catch is Mark Trammell, who had spent the last two years working on user experience for Digg. Trammell will start his new job at Twitter in a week on the design team working to build a user research program.

Trammell is the latest in a series of long-time employees to leave Digg in recent months. In May, former lead architect Joe Stump announced he was leaving to do a new mobile location startup (now called SimpleGeo) with former SocialThing founder Matt Galligan. A couple of weeks ago, Digg’s design lead Daniel Burka, announced he would be joined Tiny Speck, the new social gaming startup led by former Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

Despite the loses, Digg still has no real peer in terms of size in the social news space. Founder Kevin Rose recently spoke with Sarah Lacy backstage at TechCrunch50 about what is going right with Digg and some plans for the future. Notably, Sarah asked about if upcoming changes will make Digg more of a Twitter competitor, to which Rose replied that he didn’t think so. Instead, he wants to leverage Twitter to spread Digg’s stories more, and to bring Twitter users into the Digg experience. Trammell, it seems, should be able to help ease that transition if Twitter feels the same way.

Trammell sounds particularly enthusiastic about his new gig:

I’ll be working with a new set of folks I admire (Doug Bowman, for instance) on a site that is changing the way the world communicates. Did I mention I’m excited? ‘Cause I am.

Trammell notes that despite his new job, he will continue to advise Digg on user research. Meanwhile, Twitter is rapidly approaching 100 employees.