Mike Brown is a former Facebook corporate development executive that was fired for buying stock on secondary markets. Now he has a similar job at Twitter. Brown will be reporting to Twitter VP of business development Kevin Thau.

Twitter has acquired Cloudhopper, an SMS and MMS software startup. Twitter plans to scale their SMS division as the company sends out about 1 billion tweets per month, many of them being from mobile devices.

Twitter has hired Leland Rechis, a user interface designer from Google.  The announcement was made by Kevin Thau, Director of Business Development at Twitter through a tweet (naturally).  “Very excited to have @leland join the Twitter Mobile team today,” stated Thau.

Biz Stone and Ev Williams both worked at Google through the acquisition of Blogger before starting up Twitter.  Another Google exec Doug Bowman left the search engine company to join the micro-blogging startup.

Why switch from Google to Twitter?  Google has roughly 20,000 employees.  Employees are probably starting to feel that their contributions aren’t as groundbreaking as they used to be.  And Twitter is one of the hottest and most talked about start-ups in the Valley right now.