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Twitter Opens Their Messaging Platform

by Jesse Stay — published on January 16th, 2008

Today, in the first post on the new Twitter Technology Blog, Alex Payne announced that Twitter is releasing their underlying messaging platform, which they call, “Starling”, to the community. From the announcement it appears Starling is the basis for handling all communication underneath Twitter, speaks memcached, and reminds me in some ways of Perl POE, for Ruby. This is the development baby of Twitter, a great move by the new head of Engineering for Twitter, and a great benefit to the development community! Twitter is starting to remind me very much of Google in its philosophies, starting with a core technology, focusing on that, then figuring out monetization after the fact, all while giving back to the community. Way to go Twitter!

Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 7:55 pm. Filed under Business, Google, OSS, Perl, Reviews, Social Media, Social Network Optimization (SNO), Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Ari (nice meeting you yesterday!), we may, but if history shows, when you are the one releasing the open source software, that means you are also the one controlling the development. You will always be one step ahead of your competition, and as your competition evolves, they have to also publish their changes for you to use as well. Twitter knows their software inside and out, and can release features much faster than that of their competition because of that.


    Not just that, but this isn't new Technology. As I mentioned, this is just a Ruby version of Perl's POE Framework, which has been around for years. It still hasn't affected Twitter's success.

  • does this mean we'll see a new flurry of twitter clones? or that Twitter now feels secure enough in its market position and brand that giving away the core messaging tech won't impact their growth?

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