Update: TechCrunchIT interviews Gnip founders and Plaxo execs on the launch. Watch the video here.
MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier sold his company to Yahoo in January 2007 for an estimated $10 million. He left Yahoo in July 2007 with the seed of a new idea germinating in his head - “Make data portability suck less.”
The result of that thinking is Gnip, a new service we first mentioned in March 2008 when they announced seed funding.
Today the details are being revealed and the service is launching. Gnip isn’t a consumer service. Rather, it’s designed to sit in between social networks and other web services that produce a lot of user content and data (like Digg, Delicious, Flickr, etc.) and data consumers (like Plaxo, SocialThing, MyBlogLog, etc.) with the express goal of reducing API load and making the services more efficient.
A close analogy is a blog ping server (see our overview here). Ping servers tell blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search when a blog has been updated, so the search engines don’t have to constantly re-index sites just to see if new content has been posted. Instead, the blog tells the ping server when it updates, which tells the search engines to drop by and re-index. The creation of the first ping server, Weblogs.com, by Dave Winer resulted in orders of magnitude better efficiency for blog search engines.
The same thinking basically applies to Gnip. The idea is to gather simple information from social networks - just a username and the fact that they created new content (like writing a Twitter message, for example). Gnip then distributes that data to whoever wants it, and those downstream services can then access the core service’s API, with proper user authentication, and access the actual data (in our example, the actual Twitter message).
From a user’s perspective, the result is faster data updates across services and less downtime for services since their APIs won’t be hit as hard.
For a fuller description of how Gnip works, see the full overview at TechCrunchIT and this discussion on datastream aggregators.
Digg, a launch partner of Gnip, clearly sees the benefit - they are giving unfettered access to Gnip to their API in the hope that some third party services will stop using it altogether and move to Gnip instead. Other launch partners include Plaxo, Delicious, Discus, Flickr, Get Satisfaction, MyBlogLog, Six Apart, Iminta, Lijit, Social Thing and Spokeo. Notably absent from the list of partners is Twitter, which may be the one service that needs something like Gnip the most.
Gnip worked with Pivotal Labs to develop the service.
I’d be curious to know how much faster these updates can occur because of the service. How do they make money? Who pays them?
Josh
http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
It will be interesting to see how FeedBurner responds. It seems like these guys aren’t far from direct competition.
I too am curious about the business model…
This is a good idea; Feedburner for everything. But whereas Feedburner was a polling model, this is an event-based model!
Congratulations on the launch. What syndication opportunities are built into GNIP?
Feedburner? I’m curious how *Parker Brothers* is going to respond!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX2bqI–c-k
Maybe he’s trying for a manufactured controversy PR/marketing play?
Regarding Digg — I’d like to be clear that they have build one of the best APIs on the web and it is very much not their hope that people stop using it. By broadcasting usage notifications to consumers, our hope is that more people use the API in creative and interesting ways.
Regarding the business model — there are always monetization opportunities when your customers are businesses as opposed to consumers. We are addressing the very specific pains associated with aggregating data from various sources and people are often willing to pay for pain relief. Not necessarily in the consumer web space, but perhaps in the enterprise arena. For now, we’re taking the iterate, iterate, iterate approach and when we’ve got a field-tested suite of solutions we think we have a shot at asking folks in the enterprise space to pay.
Once again it´s just VaporWare… after 2 months of delay i was expecting at least something in beta stage… not in pre-alpha
But the better part is the catch phrase “Making data portability suck less”, Chris Messina Style, and then not even implementing the possibility to log with openID…
How does this compare with twitabit (which involves Winer)?
i really dont get exactly what this ssites does?
i even went to the site and read the about section and just like this post it is vague
is it a friendfeed type of site?
Darkua, OpenID isn’t neccesary with a service like this as it’s mostly behind the scenes. Please don’t confuse data portability concept with something as lackluster as OpenID has been.
OpenID != Data Portability
Data Portability = Array[GNip, OpenID, Microformats...]
Eric — congrats on the launch! It’s highly value-add services like this that really help drive efficiencies. I think people will come to realize that very fast. Congrats again!
We just integrated Brightkite into Gnip as well
Best way I’d describe Gnip is that it’s a data abstraction layer for APIs instead of databases
Hehe, Scott is running Mashery and Eric is Gnip, isn’t it nice to have create apps that you can collectively sell?
Now thats what I call Silicon Valley mafia
This is going after Friendfeed …
Am I banned from commenting?
my comments got pulled too. does Arrington have a stake in these guys that negative comments get pulled?
@Google FanBoy: No I didn’t mean that. Though, I do admit my comment wasn’t exactly positive.
I guess the most probable reason was that I had included a link to Sun Microsystem’s website (for more info). I guess the spam filter went into overdrive mode
Stoicho — No, we’re not. Let a thousand flowers bloom, yo.
Hassan — Any chance you’ll post again? Would love to see what you were going to say (along with the link, if possible).
Looks like he’ll be making some cash of the social sites, mybloglog sucks btw!
Many could think of feed right away. Blog 1 -> Feed -> Blog 2. How difficult it is? It not patented, FeedBurner can implement the same thing over night.
Hmm. Doesn’t this break SSL end-to-end security promise?
Let’s say I am an end user of a web site ‘A’ that aggregates data from various web sites that I am on. Web site A needs my userIDs and passwords to these other web sites so it can go out and fetch data from these sites with my credentials, and provide me with aggregation. Normally, the conversation between website A and some other site is through web services on top of an SSL session, and the SSL session is guaranteed to be end-to-end secure as my userid/password traverses the wire.
How does this middle man service guarantee that my credential is secure when the aggregator site A uses the middle man to extract my data from other web sites?
I think it’s a perfect man-in-the-middle attack scenario.
Bong — we only deal with public data. Gnip does not accept or provide credentials for user accounts.
The words “single point of failure” come to mind.
If this really becomes a major success and service start to rely on it, a Gnip outage (and yes, shit happens, no matter how good you think you are) will make us look back fondly at the mild annoyance of a weekend of Twitter downtime.
Is GNIP the kind of thing Apple was talking about for iPhone 3G? A sort of messaging service that apps can use, in the case of iPhone developer apps when they’re not online. May not be the same thing, but could GNIP be used for that?
I kinda agree with Rick, why isn’t single point failure a problem? I guess there’s nothing wrong with companies like Digg preferring developers use GNIP rather than their direct API, but it’s not like Digg is turning off the API, right?