Oh, crap, Eric’s gone and written another long post…

Since we publicly launched Gnip last week, we’ve been asked numerous times if we can integrate with Twitter or somehow help Twitter with the scaling issues they are facing.  We can, but we depend on Twitter giving us access to their XMPP feed.

We are huge fans of Twitter so we’re patiently waiting for that access.  In the mean time, the questions we’ve received have prompted us to explain two things: (1) How we would benefit Twitter and anyone who wants access to Twitter data and (2) Why – if you are a web service – it’s worth integrating now with Gnip rather than waiting either for (a) Gnip to integrate with Twitter or (b) you to get as popular as Twitter and have scale issues.

Let’s address the first issue: How we would benefit Twitter and anyone that wants to integrate with Twitter data.

Twitter has found that XMPP doesn’t scale for them and as a result, people are forced to poll their API *a lot* to get updates for their users.  MyBlogLog has over 25,000 Twitter users that they throw against the Twitter API every 15 minutes.  This results in nearly 2.5 million queries against the API every day, for maybe 250K updates.  Now add millions of pings from Plaxo and SocialThing and Lijit and heaven forbid Yahoo starts beating up their API…

If Twitter starts pushing updates to us, via our dead simple API or Atom or their XMPP server, we can immediately reduce by an order of magnitude the number of requests that some very large sites are making against their API.  At the same time, we reduce the latency between when someone Tweets and when it shows up on consuming sites like Plaxo.  From 15 minutes or more to 60 seconds or less.

We expect that Twitter has their collective heads down and are working around the clock to buttress their infrastructure, and it’s unlikely that they’re going to do anything optional until that’s sorted out.  Unfortunately, “integrate with Gnip” probably falls into the optional category. We expect, however, that at some point Twitter will start opening up their data to more partners once they feel like they have their arms around their infrastructure.

If you run a web service and integrate with Gnip today, you’ll automatically be able to integrate with Twitter data once they give us access.  Presumably you won’t have to wait in line to get direct Twitter integration.  In addition, you’ll have immediate access to all of the other data providers that we integrate with. Such as  Delicious, Flickr, Magnolia, Get Satisfaction, Intense Debate and Six Apart.  For example, only took Brightkite 15 minutes to integrate our API and start pushing data to our partners via us.

Now for the second topic.  Why – if you are a web service – it’s worth integrating with Gnip now rather than waiting either for (a) Gnip to integrate with Twitter or (b) you to get as popular as Twitter and have scale issues.

All things considered, it’s best not to end up in Twitter’s position.  They have a ton of passionate users (I’m one of them) who want reliable service and don’t have infinite patience.  The old startup cliche of “these are problems we’d like to have” is carp.

You don’t want to be in the position where your business suddenly takes off and your infrastructure falls over because people are banging your APIs to death.  You don’t want your most passionate users calling for mass exodus.  It’s better to take a few minutes to start pushing notifications to Gnip now than when you’re doing 20-hour days rebooting servers.

You also don’t want to be in the position that your company takes off and you suddenly get throttled by an API provider.  Nothing is worse than have to pull data sources because you’ve over-polled and the host decides to turn off the spigot.  Start pulling notifications from Gnip and feel secure that you’re only asking for data when there’s something new.

I still use Twitter every day.  Don’t try to kid me; I know you still do too.  Let them get on with their work and rest assured that we’ll integrate with them the instant we get the okay from them.