Twitter has hired its first commerce chief. Nathan Hubbard, the former president of Ticketmaster, started at the company this week and will reportedly focus on enabling shopping via posts on the social network. According to Bloomberg, the company hopes to offer its brand partners tools for selling products inside tweets. "We're going to go to people who have stuff to sell and help them use Twitter to sell it more effectively," Hubbard tells Bloomberg. While at Ticketmaster, Hubbard had overseen a $75 million overhaul of the company's online services.

In exchange for letting brands sell their products on the increasingly prominent network, Twitter may take a cut of all sales; the company hopes to collaborate with companies rather than compete against them. "One of the hallmarks of Twitter's entire approach has been partnering," Hubbard says. "We're going to take the same approach with owners of physical and digital goods." The ultimate goal for Twitter — beyond additional revenue it would get from partnering with brands — is to ultimately get more information about the people who use the service, thus making Twitter more valuable to advertisers. There's also some speculation that the hiring of Hubbard and his plans for Twitter commerce are all tied into a future IPO — but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is still remaining mum about that potential option.