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Twitter has been making some more hires recently – first up is Robin Sloan, who joins to handle media partnerships. Sloan previously worked as a strategist and executive at Current TV. During the first presidential debate of 2008, Sloan built an application to overlay tweets on the bottom of the screen. Spookily he was also the author of Twitter’s 5 billionth tweet.

Also joining is user experience designer Mark Otto, who worked at ZURB, an interaction design firm whose listed clients include TinyPic and CC:Betty. And finally Dan Webb, the London web developer behind Twaudio, which brought MP3s to Twitter through direct uploads or recording.

(Hat tips to Venturebeat and Louis Gray)

Louis estimates the total number at Twitter to be around 158 following a regular weekly pattern of hiring. It seems as if the desire to evolve and most importantly monetise, will be the main drivers. After all, the user experience of the Twitter website hasn’t changed in great detail for some time (The main added features have been the new Retweets and Location), and meanwhile 3rd party clients are constantly finding new ways to improve on the default experience.

Beyond the UI for consumers, this could really be about improving the experience for the monetisable advertisers, marketers and customer service teams. Big businesses are generally used to working with well-polished, expensive systems, and polished controls/dashboards for business use will add to the draw for mainstream business.

It’s a popular question today, after both Techcrunch and Mashable covered the launch of The New Platforms Fund, which will invest between $1000-$3000 in 10 ideas (plus human support), in exchange for a minor equity stake.

Techcrunch was pretty disparaging about the idea (headline: If you are really, really desperate for cash, these guys will give you $3k) Mashable’s take was a bit more open about the diea.

If you want to apply, the form is here.

But what is quite interesting is the debate in the TC comments around how much this could actually fund – obviously it’s not enough to pay for a team of developers for a year, but could it help 1 or 2-person start-ups just out of college to spend a month or two on one idea?

Or, given the current state of the economy and job market, could it be enough to make the mortgage payment for a month whilst you try something different? Or to get the services of a developer or designer for a week or two to make a simple concept into reality?

After all, Stocktwits got more funding after just two months.

But do you think $1-3k is enough to get something started? And is it worth giving up some equity in order to reach another round of funding?