Gnip: Grand Central Station for the Social Web
GNIP is an intermediary service for interchanging data among different Web2.0 APIs without actually pulling content from the source on every transaction. By acting as both an interchange and a intermediary storage location, the service improves latency, decreases polling, and appears to be working to standardize metadata between the services. According to RWW, “It’s about scalability” and “it sounds like a great idea.”
While I’ll confess to not being fully versed in the backend magic, I can definitely see value in a system that acts as a blackbox and does transforms between non-standard implementations. This seems especially beneficial considering the speed with which new producers/consumers companies are emerging on the scene.
GNIP’s technology allows “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.”
A nice bonus is that the service is free for all non-commercial users and commercial users who are “tracking more than 10,000 people and/or rules for a certain data provider”.
Articles @ RWW and Techcrunch