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]“.

Let me again be clear: We received no shortage of tips from very good sources last week about what Tr.im was doing behind the scenes while all of this played out. Not one of those tips was from either Bit.ly or Twitter or anyone directly related to them. Instead, they came from third-parties who were actively or passively pursuing a Tr.im acquisition. For example, we heard the $80,000 to $100,000 figure Nambu wanted for Tr.im from no less than three sources. And even more sources came forward to say they had heard that general price range as well and thought it was unreasonable, especially considering how Nambu handled the Tr.im situation, losing user trust in the process. So is it really any surprise today that they announce they’re going open source?

Does it suck that Twitter’s choice of Bit.ly made it hard for services like Tr.im to operate? Sure. But plenty of others are still out there doing it rather than descending into conspiracy theories. And it’s just poor form to drag other services into this mess, like Gnip, which is trying to do a good thing with 301works.org. Yes, it was Bit.ly’s idea, but Gnip is now handling it as a independant third-party, and no shortage of other URL shortening services have joined on. Obviously, some of those services probably don’t like that Twitter chose Bit.ly, but they deal with it and realize that a movement like this is worth teaming up with rivals for the good of all of them.

“It saddens me that this is how Tr.im is portraying 301works,” Gnip’s Eric Marcoullier told us today. He went on to reiterate that Gnip is simply serving as an independant third party for the project, attempting to do something good and useful. And while a ReadWriteWeb article on the matter today seemed to suggest that Tr.im was working actively with Gnip for this new crowd-sourced Tr.im, Marcoullier notes that anyone is free to push data through Gnip, but that he hasn’t specifically talked to Nambu about how Tr.im will use it. He also notes that since Tr.im will now be open source, he hopes the community behind it makes its data a part of 301works.

We have reached out to Tr.im to try and clear up their misplaced anger about this, but have yet to hear back. If we do, we will update.

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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.

One of the holdups in Tr.im’s participation was that it didn’t want one company ruling all of this data. And while Gnip will be handling it at first, to get the project off the ground, the plan is still to find a non-profit group to manage 301works. All the members are clear that they want this to be an open-source project that sets users’ minds at ease about using URL-shorteners.

The service will launch sometime in the next few weeks, after the participating companies have a chance to tell their users that they will be backing up their links on 301works. While most are unlikely to have a problem with that, some might, so they’re giving them some time to opt-out.

So how will 301works actually work? Well here are the key points for how companies will be able to back up their links:

• URL shortening services decide the frequency that they will make updates.
• URL shortening services decide how their updates can be made available to the public. Some services will provide regular uploads and downloads (hourly, daily, weekly, etc) and some will opt for a pure archival approach.
• Gnip is providing the infrastructure service to support aggregating data from URL shortening services. Gnip will provide the infrastructure service to compress the data into pre-defined download options for end users.
• Companies will be able to submit data via a REST API using HTTP POST over SSL. In addition, Gnip can provide other approaches on request.

All of this sounds great on paper, but the question of just how well this system works remains to be seen. Still, it’s promising that we’re seeing a bunch of companies take action on this so quickly after an incident that left a lot of people concerned about the future of URL-shorteners.

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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.

The new push service lets companies filter and white-label the stream so the technology is fully integrated into the business’ infrastructure. Companies list out the most common data requests that are made on their APIs and websites and Gnip will collect the relevant data and deliver it in real-time to any approved third-party. For example, a travel website like Expedia or Kayak may use Gnip’s service to track and deliver real-time information on how customers are interacting with airline deals to the vendors that are listing flights on their site, like American Airlines or Delta. The real-time capabilities would let a travel site analyze real-time data and syndicate changes in fare sales immediately.

Gnip is also launching a early-stage startup partner program that will let startups access to all of Gnip’s service features and data services. The program is aimed towards software development startups that have been in business for less than 3 years and generating less than $200,000 in revenue. Of course, Gnip requires that partners pay a fee of $1000 but says the services that they will receive are valued at $10,000 per month. Dipity, Toobla and Klout are all pilot partners of the new program.

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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.

Data consumers using Gnip’s platform can also 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, subject only to the terms of service of those networks. Gnip also offers a number of filter options to allow data consumers the ability to create rules based queries based on tags, keywords, etc.

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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).

Here is what is supposed to happen once you have Zentact all set up. Reading an article about black labs? A box pops up to remind you that your co-editor loves black labs and lets you email him the article with a note right from that page. Run across a blog post that mentions a contact’s company? Same thing happens. You can forward that article or link and make yourself look thoughtful in the same way that setting up automatic birthday reminders in your calendar or Amazon makes you look like you went the extra effort to remember someone’s birthday.

“This is basically a karma points system,” says investor and adviser Eric Marcoullier, the CEO of Gnip. Marcoullier and Zentact co-founders John Sampson and Jared Brandt are all MyBloglog refugees. They founded Zentact with a few hundred thousand dollars. (Howard Lindzon is their biggest angel investor).

Before you can start using Zentact, first it needs to ingest all of your contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail. Then—and this is its weak point—you have to tag each contact with their interests, company affiliations, and whatnot. That right there almost makes it a non-starter for me. Some people, I realize, will do this obsessive tagging (sales people, recruiters, biz dev types), but not most people. I have 2,318 contacts in Gmail. There is no way I am going to go through and tag those. It would be much better if Zentact could simply get all of this information from one of my existing social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, which already know all of my contacts’ interests and affiliations.

The software, however, does have a saving grace. Whenever you email someone in Gmail, a Zentact box opens up right in the email below the address field where you can add tags and other data in a piecemeal fashion. That makes the process a lot less daunting, and lets you focus on the people you actually are in contact with the most frequently.

Once that is set up, then the Zentact box is supposed to pop up whenever it reads a tag contextually on a page and tell you which contacts you might want to email the link with a thoughtful note. It acts a a surrogate super-connector brain in that way. Explains Marcoullier:

The vast majority of people get information, they process it for internal use, and then move on. Why not build a plugin that reads what you are reading and alerts you to the fact that it might be relevant to someone in your network?

That could be helpful or annoying depending on how often it pops up. You can moderate that based on the tags you use. The actual mechanics of Zentact are still a little bit buggy in my experience (although that could just be my dying computer or the fact that I imported way too many contacts). But this is a rough beta and there is a lot of promise here.

Once you’ve tagged a bunch of contacts, then you can click on each tag at Zentact’s Website and see all the contacts who share a certain interest. This could be great for organizing soccer games or biking trips or a startup, or that matter. It all depends on how good is your personal tag database. How well do you know your contacts and what they are good at?

Zentact will soon add the ability to actually connect like-minded contacts to each other, which is really what super-connectors do. When it does that and can automatically tag your contacts for you, then I’ll really be excited about it. But what I really want is for my existing social networks to do this for me.

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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.

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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.

Data consumers can get complete public data streams for Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Six Apart and others without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs, subject only to the terms of service of those services. And this data can be gathered via a REST-based API or the newly launched XMPP support.

Gnip also added a number of filter options to allow data consumers the ability to create rules based queries based on tags, keywords, etc.

Gnip’s business model is freemium – lots of data for free and commercial data consumers pay when they go over certain thresholds (non commercial use is free). The model is based on the number of users and the number of filters tracked. Basically, any time a service is tracking more than 10,000 people and/or rules for a certain data provider, they’ll start paying at a rate of $0.01 per user or rule per month, with a maximum payment of $1,000 per month for each data provider tracked. For now billing is turned off and the service remains completely free. Thirty to sixty days from now, people will start to pay.

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What does this mean for the average Twitter user? It means that more third party services will start to work better. Today, other than a handful of services like Summize (which was just acquired by Twitter) and Friendfeed, third party apps must talk to Twitter via their normal APIs. Those APIs require applications to send Twitter a request and then get a response. The two way communication creates a big load on Twitter in the aggregate.

With XMPP Twitter just sends out all of their data in a constant stream, whether you ask for it or not. The third party, in this case Gnip, takes the data and parses it for further use.

Gnip acts as an intermediary between applications that create social content and those that consume it. They take the Twitter feed, which is a list of usernames, Twitter status URLs and time stamps, and make it available to any third party that requests it. Both Plaxo and MyBlogLog are already using the new feed, and more partners will add it immediately. And every third party that takes data from Gnip doesn’t have to take it from Twitter, easing the overall load on Twitter’s servers.

For now Gnip is only sending updates for requested users, not the richer data that some applications like Twhirl need to build a Twitter-like desktop environment. Twitter may give Gnip permission to send additional data, like @replies and direct messages, over time (if that last sentence doesn’t mean anything to you, it means you aren’t a crazy-heavy Twitter user, just disregard it).

What this means is that Twitter is taking yet another step towards openness and leaning on outside parties to help them with scaling issues.

Battle Over: Twitter Open Up To Gnip. Read more at TechcrunchIT >>

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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.

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Eric is now preparing to launch a new startup, Gnip. Details are scarce for now – Marcoullier isn’t saying what the new startup will do other than a hint on the site itelf – “Web 2.0 Infrastructure,” and a message that the service will launch in May.

The startup is already funded, he says, with a $1 million round from Foundry Group and SoftTech VC. Foundry Group’s Brad Feld and SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier are joining the board of directors of the company.

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