Oh, this is rich. The Nambu Network, owners of the URL-shortening service Tr.im announced today that the service will go open source on or before September 15 of this year. That’s odd since the service has now gone from completely shutting down, to trying hard to sell, to bringing the service back up so it can sell, to now going open source in just 8 days.

Let me be clear, going open source is a great idea, I’m not sure if it will help Tr.im all that much, but on paper it sounds great. That’s what they should have done originally. But in a post today on Tr.im’s blog the service first apologizes for this whole fiasco, and then attempts to place blame elsewhere. As I read it, it’s either Bit.ly’s fault for making a low-ball offer to buy the Tr.im, Twitter’s fault for picking Bit.ly over Tr.im as its URL shortener of choice, 301works.org’s fault for being a “public relations stunt”, and yes, even TechCrunch’s fault because we “simply repeat vertbatim what twitter/bit.ly feeds [us]“.

Perhaps you’ve been following the Tr.im fiasco. If not, basically the URL shortening service shut down and said all its links would cease to work by the end of the year, dealing a severe blow to users of any URL shortening service. Tr.im has since recanted its decision (if only to make it easier to sell), but the problem is still a very real one: What happens if your favorite URL-shortener just shuts down? 301works hopes to solve that.

Perhaps you heard about 301works in one of our recent pieces about how Bit.ly was attempting to salvage the Tr.im wreckage. The idea was the 301works would be a centralized hub for all shortened URLs, not run by any one URL-shortener. Tr.im balked at the idea of joining, but plenty of others are, including Bit.ly, Awe.sm, Adjix, betaworks, Cligs, and URLizer. All of them are teaming up with Gnip to launch this project.

The Web is speeding up and Gnip wants to help push it along. Today, the API aggregation platform is releasing its own Push API which lets any site patch together its own version of Friendfeed or Twitter-like data stream. Gnip will be speaking at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp tomorrow on the Real-Time Business panel.

Gnip lets data-consuming services like Plaxo that take data from other services (like Twitter, Facebook Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, etc.) collect data from requested users pushed to them. Data consumers using Gnip’s platform can get public data streams for over 30 social media networks and sites, including Twitter, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, Six Apart and others without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs.

Gnip, a platform that helps move data around from one social network to the next, is now integrated with Facebook so that the platform can access data via Facebook’s recently launched open API stream.

Gnip lets data-consuming services like Plaxo that take data from other services (like Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, etc.) collect data from requested users pushed to them. Data consuming services are no longer required to build pollers for any of the publishers pushing data into Gnip, they just give Gnip an endpoint and they push the data to them in real time. With Gnip’s Facebook integration, developers and data collectors can choose the specific Facebook users from among those that have authorized their applications and then Gnip will immediately begin collecting the relevant data, normalize it and deliver it in real-time to the developer’s separate applications.

There is something about great sales people or deal makers that is entirely social. They are connectors, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them—people who know the interests, skills, and needs of everyone in their social or business circle and connects them together. If you are really good at this, like Sidney Weinberg (a legend who helped build Goldman Sachs), you are a super-connector.

Zentact has the modest goal to help you become a super-connector. It has a long way to go before it can do that. But it is starting with the kernel of something that is intriguing. At its core, Zentact is a browser add-on (for Firefox only right now) that helps you read the Web with the interests of your social network in mind. If you want to try it out, we have 500 invites for the private beta (but once you are in, you can invite as many people as you want by sending them a message through Zentact).

I know this back end plumbing stuff is boring to most of you, but Gnip is worth the trouble to understand. The company, which helps ease the transportation of social content between services (like getting Twitter data to Plaxo, for example), took a new $3.5 million round of financing. Investors include Foundry Group, First Round Capital and SoftTech VC, and the company has raised a total of $4.6 million, all this year.

The company acts as a clearing house for social content, easing the load on content distributors like Digg, Twitter, Delicious and Six Apart. Content consumers like Plaxo and MyBloglog benefit from a single endpoint and a standardized way of accessing data. In short, it unclogs the plumbing.

TechCrunchIT spoke with the Gnip founders on video immediately after launch. In September they launched version 2.0 of the service, and discussed their business model.

Gnip, the guys that are helping move data around from one social network to the next, launched v 2.0 of the service tonight.

The new version of the service allows data consumers (services like Plaxo that take data from other services, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, etc.) to have data from requested users pushed to them. It’s no longer “Hey, TechCrunch just tweeted. Go query the API to get the data.” Now it’s “TechCrunch just tweeted – here’s the data.” Data consumers are no longer required to build pollers for any of the publishers pushing data into Gnip, they just give Gnip an endpoint and they push the data to them in real time.