It went under the radar of most people and tech bloggers, but this ground breaking stuff from the micro-blogging giant Twitter.

A few days ago Starling the messaging queue platform used by Twitter has been released to the open source community to tinker with.
According to Alex Payne in the brand new Twitter Technology Blog:

Starling is at the core of what we do at Twitter; it moves small messages around to daemons that work on jobs like processing updates, delivering messages, archiving user accounts, and so forth.

Until now, Starling has lived a sheltered life in the Twitter code base. We’re happy to announce that Starling is now open source and freely available for anyone to use, modify, and improve. We’re eager to see patches and to start a proper open source community around Starling.

This is a bold move, and I agree with Jesse Stay when he compares Twitter to an early Google.

Any developer can now improve on Twitter’s work, possibly making for a better and faster service. I don’t believe that with this release there will be a swarm of Twitter clones popping all over the web, mainly because the costs of supporting tens of thousands of SMS are pretty steep and also because it’s not a simple service to monetize.

Twitter has the micro blogging and virtual presence market cornered, and while it isn’t a monopoly there isn’t much in the way of competition. Jaiku is still light years away and Google hasn’t yet done anything to cover the ground gained by Twitter.