If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps this tweet is worth more: “Said goodbye to Pixar today. Loved every minute of my time there. Couldn’t be more excited about the adventure awaiting me at Twitter.”

 

Ali Rowghani will join Twitter as its chief financial officer in March, after having worked in finance – most recently as CFO – at Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios since 2001, the Wall Street Journal reported. Pixar Animation Studios is an Academy Award-winning computer animation studio with the technical, creative and production capabilities to create a new generation of animated feature films, merchandise and other related products.

 

After a peak in growth rates in early 2009, uptake of Twitter slowed dramatically toward the end of the year, dropping from about a 13-percent growth rate in March to about 3.5 percent in October 2009, HubSpot reports. That in itself represents a huge deceleration from 2008, when growth rates were in four-digit percentages, TMCnet reported last month.

 

Twitter CEO Evan Williams told the Wall Street Journal that “Ali will be an important member of a growing team focused on creating value for our users and capturing the financial opportunities that result from it.”

 

Only about 18 million U.S. Internet users may be Twitter users, meaning Twitter is used by about 11 percent of Internet users. At that level of adoption, Twitter appears to be a useful social network, but not a transforming application for most users, as reported by TMCnet’s Gary Kim (News - Alert).