A few months ago a handful of folks came together and took a practical look at the state of “web services” on the network today. As an industry we’ve enjoyed the explosion of web APIs over the past several years, but it’s been “every man for himself,” and we’ve been left with hundreds of web APIs being consumed in random ways (random protocols and formats). There have been a few cracks at standardizing some of this, but most have been left in spec form with, at best, fragmented implementations, and most have been too high level to provide anything more than good bedtime reading. We set out to build something; not write a story.

For a great overview of the situation Gnip is plunging into, checkout Nik Cubrilovic’s post on techcrunchIT; “The New Datastream Aggregators, FriendFeed and Standards.”.

Our first service is the culmination of lots of work by smart, pragmatic, people. From day one we’ve had excellent partners helping us along the way; from early integrations with our API, to discussing specifications and standards to follow (or not to follow; what you chose not to do is often more important than what you chose to do). While we aspire to solve all of the challenges in the data portability space, we’re a small team biting off small chunks along a path. We are going to need the support, feedback, and assistance of the broader data portability (formal & informal) community in order to succeed. Now that we’ve finally launched, we’ll be in “release early, release often” mode to ensure tight feedback loops around our products.

Enough; what did we build!?!

For those who want to cut to the chase, here’s our API doc.

We built a system that connects Data Consumers to Data Publishers in a low-latency, highly-scalable standards-based way. Data can be pushed or pulled into Gnip (via XMPP, Atom, RSS, REST) and it can be pushed or pulled out of Gnip (currently only via REST, but the rest to follow). This release of Gnip is focused on propagating user generated activity events from point A to point B. Activity XML provides a terse format for Data Publishers to distribute their user’s activities. Collections XML provides a simple way for Data Consumers to only receive information about the users they care about. This release is about “change notification,” and a subsequent release will include the actual data along with the event.

As a Consumer, whether your application model is event- or polling-based Gnip can get you near-realtime activity information about the users you care about. Our goal is a maximum 60 second latency for any activity that occurs on the network. While the time our service implementation takes to drive activities from end to end is measured in milliseconds, we need some room to breathe.

Data can come in to Gnip via many formats, but it is XSLT’d into a normalized Activity XML format which makes consuming activity events (e.g. “Joe dugg a news story at 10am”) from a wide array of Publishers a breeze. Along the way we started cringing at the verb/activity overlap between various Publishers; did Jane “tweet” or “post”, they’re kinda the same thing? After sitting down with Chris Messina, it became clear that everyone else was cringing too. A verb/activity normalization table has been started, and Gnip is going to distill the cornucopia of activities into a common, community derived, format in order to make consumption even easier.

Data Publishers now have a central clearinghouse to push data when events on their services occur. Gnip manages the relationship with Data Consumers, and figures out which protocols and formats they want to play with. It will take awhile for the system to reach equilibrium with Gnip, but once it does, API balance will be reached; Publishers will notify Gnip when things happen, and Gnip will fan-out those events to an arbitrary number of Consumers in real-time (no throttling, no rate limiting).

Gnip is centralized. After much consternation, we resolved to start out with a centralized model. Not necessarily because we think it’s the best path, but because it is the best path to get something started. Imagine the internet as a clustered application; decentralization is fundamental (DNS comes to mind). That said, we needed a starting point and now we have one. A conversation with Chris Saad highlighted some work Paul Jones (among others) had done around a standard mechanism for change notification discovery and subscription; getpingd. Getpingd describes a mechanism for distributed change notification. The Subscription side of getpingd feels like a no-brainer for Gnip to support, but I’m not sure how to consider the Discovery end of it. In some sense, I see Gnip (assuming getpingd’s discovery model is implemented) as a getpingd node in the graph. We have lots to consider in the federated/distributed model.

Gnip is a classic chicken-and-egg scenario, we need Publishers & Consumers to be interesting. If your service produces events that you want others on the network to consume, we’d love to see you as a Publisher in Gnip; pushing events into the system for wide consumption. If your service relies on events created by users on other applications, we’d love to see you as a Consumer in Gnip.

We’ve started out with convenience libraries for perl, php, java, python, and ruby. Rather than maintain these ourselves, we plan on publishing them to respective language community code sites/repositories.

That’s what we’ve built in a nutshell. I’ll soon blog about exactly how we’ve built it.