Category Archives: Gnip News

Gnip at Boulder Startup Week

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Each year, Boulder Startup Week celebrates the startup community, and Gnip is proud to be a sponsor again. In addition to bringing new talent to Boulder, it’s a great way for our startup community to come together, collaborate and learn from each other.

If you’re visiting town, be sure to check out Gnip’s open job listings. Gnip will also be speaking at the following events, and would love to say hi so seek us out!

Boulder *Hearts* Women in Tech
Gnip’s Vice President of Engineering Greg Greenstreet is speaking
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 from 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM (MDT)
Boulder, CO

Research tells us that women can make startups more efficient, more resilient, and more successful; yet there’s a dearth of women at startups. So, what to do? Boulder has a welcoming culture and startups can build welcoming cultures, too. Learn about the importance of “cultural fit,” avoiding unconscious bias, recruiting with a wide net, and writing job descriptions that don’t include the word “ninja.” Hear from local startups about their challenges and perspectives on building diversity into their cultures.

Panelists:
Greg Greenstreet, Gnip
Leslie Osborne, Standing Cloud
Jim Franklin, SendGrid
Ingrid Alongi, QuickLeft
Jenny Slade, NCWIT

Give Back, Get Back: A Guide to Boulder and OSS
A talk by Gnip’s Engineer Eoin Coffey at the Gnip office
1050 Walnut Street, #115
Boulder, CO 80302
Thursday, May 16, 2013 from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM

Boulder and Open Source Software (OSS) both thrive on having open communities that contribute. Participating in both helps you grow as both a professional and as a programmer. However, what might surprise you is the ways that your contributions help others in ways that you might not expect. This talk by Eoin Coffey of Gnip will take a look at the unique aspects of contributing to OSS and the Boulder tech community.

Food and drink provided.

How to Hire an Intern (and Be Hired)
Gnip intern Brian Lehmann and Data Scientist Dr. Scott Hendrickson will be on the panel
Friday, May 17, 2013 from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM (MDT)
RaffleCopter
1021 Pearl St.
Boulder, CO 80302

Want to hire a student developer? Or looking to get a technical internship at a startup? Come hear from a panelist of startups inlcuding Jim Franklin, CEO of SendGrid and Dr. Scott Hendrickson, Head of Data Science at Gnip who have succesfully hired students. Also hear the prospective of students who have worked at startups including Gnip, Rally Software and TeamSnap about how to do it right. The event will be followed up by a last minute networking session for students looking for positions at startups.

Data Story: Phil Harris of Geofeedia

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Data Stories is Gnip’s ongoing series telling the stories of the people and companies that are doing groundbreaking work in social data. This week we’re interviewing Phil Harris, CEO of Geofeedia, a company that allows you to search and monitor social media by location. Geofeedia is a recent Gnip customer, and I love what they’re doing. The inherent value of Geofeedia was made clear to me when we received a media request looking for all social media that was geotagged close to the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Content + location creates powerful stories and Geofeedia is making it easier to find the right ones. 

1. What social data sources do you wish had geotagged data?
Our business is built on the fundamental premise of open source social data aggregation.  Or, I should say, every source. That said, there are currently major social data sources that provide public location data based on location identifier versus geotag. We will accommodate location id to integrate these data sources, but I strongly believe that over time, the benefits of more precise geo-location tagging on social media content will encourage these services to move towards geotagging. When they do, we’re exceptionally well positioned to translate that evolution into benefit for our clients.

2. If you’re a user, what do you think is the advantage of sharing your geodata?
We’ve barely scratched the surface of how geodata will deliver value to consumers. I believe the rapidly growing penetration of smartphones and adoption of geo-centric applications such as navigation will create a rich ecosystem of geo-data driven benefits. I am speaking with major consumer brands who believe that they will be able to create and maintain consumer relationships via location based social media in ways that will deliver significant value back to the individual user.

3. What can you find with Geofeedia that you can’t find on other platforms?
I know from analyzing our data with active customers that a significant amount of user generated content is missed by traditional keyword or hashtag centric monitoring tools. We complement these platforms to ensure relevant location based content is delivered to our customers in real-time.

4. Only a small portion of social media is geotagged, do you think this will change in the future?
I do. We’re seeing an increase every quarter, but as brands start rolling out compelling reasons for consumers to geotag their content, I believe geotagged social media will become the default.

5. How do you think Geofeedia will be used for good?
The leading businesses I’m speaking with consider Geofeedia as a tool to improve their overall customer experience. Understanding an individual social media conversation at a moment in time at a given location drastically improves the ways brands can serve their customers. Also, numerous public safety agencies are using Geofeedia to improve their ability to respond to natural disasters and other scenarios where real-time, location based social media awareness delivers great value.

6. How will real-time geo monitoring affect a brand’s ability to connect with their customers?
Like I said, the major brands with whom I’m speaking are evaluating how to improve their overall customer experience across all touch points – sales, customer service, loyalty – through real-time location based monitoring, analysis and engagement. I do believe that real-time, location based social media engagement will drastically improve a brand’s ability to have a meaningful, new type of relationship with their customers and become a de facto element of their communication mix.

Welcoming Estimize, Gnip’s Latest Premium Publisher

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At Gnip, we’ve always had a theory that financial firms would be hungry for social data. What has happened has surpassed our expectations, though; we’ve seen an incredible hunger from firms wishing to use social data as a news source, a sentiment signal and a research set.

One of the ways we’ve measured the success of how this sector uses social data is by how often our customers ask for additional social data sources. One of the most consistent asks we’ve heard has been for for Estimize, a crowdsourced earnings estimates platform that provides open sourced financial estimates with incredibly transparency, making it a valuable and unique set of social data.

We’re excited to now be the exclusive provider of Estimize’s streaming data, delivering our trading customers yet another competitive edge driven by social interaction. Estimize has a community of 2,50 vetted analysts that create estimates that beat comparable Wall Street reports more than 67% of the time. In the short few years since Estimize has been founded they’ve become a force, and we believe this dataset- and the power of this dataset- will continue to increase substantially over time.

Watching how the financial industry has incorporated social data from StockTwits, Twitter and now Estimize is proving the utility of social data and we’re excited to be on the vanguard of that.

Access to Public APIs from Instagram, bitly, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Panaramio and Plurk

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Our customers care about every public conversation that happens online. Every month we deliver more than 100 billion social data activities to our clients. While much of our social data is from our premium publishers (Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, Disqus and StockTwits), we also make a wide range of social data from public APIs readily available through our Enterprise Data Collector product. A significant part of what Gnip does is make social data easier to digest by optimizing the polling of these APIs and by enriching and normalizing the data. We also normalize the data, so if you’re digesting social data from Gnip from the public API of Instagram, it will appear in the same normalized format as social data from Twitter.

To that end, we’re announcing the addition of the public APIs for Instagram, bitly, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Panaramio and Plurk to the Gnip Enterprise Data Collector. While some of those might make perfect sense to you, others might make you turn your head and say, “huh.” Below we have more background on each publisher and why they’re important to the social data ecosystem.

Instagram on Enterprise Data Collector

This photo sharing app, recently acquired by Facebook, continues to be one of the fastest growing social networks out there with 90 monthly million active users. Every day there are 40 million photos uploaded, and every second users like 8,500 photos and make 1,000 comments about them. Our customers have traditionally been very interested in geotagged social data, and between 15 to 25 percent of Instagram users geotag their photographs.

Instagram has become a popular marketing tool for brands from Anthropologie, Intel, Virgin America, Taco Bell and American Express to name a few with Instagram accounts. Furthermore, we’ve really started to see Instagram as a popular tool around current events and for citizen reporting. During Hurricane Sandy, many people used Instagram as a way to document what was happening around them and showing destruction in real time. With the recent inauguration, CNN asked users to tag their Inaugural Instagram photos with #CNN and they saw users submitting an average of 25 photos every few seconds.

Customers accessing the Enterprise Data Collector will be able to access popular posts, conduct tag searches and geosearches.

Potential Uses for the Instagram API:

  • Tracking photos around natural disasters
  • Geo use cases for a given location
  • Brand monitoring

bitly on Enterprise Data Collector

bitly is the easiest and most fun way to save, share and discover links from around the web. While commonly associated as a link shortener for Twitter, bitly is used across the web and provides great information about what social sites are driving traffic. People use bitly to share 80 million new links a day.

Gnip customers will be able to search keywords some of destination page title and URL and some of the content and header tags.

Potential Uses for the bitly API:

  • Monitoring for brand mentions
  • Understanding trending content

Reddit on Enterprise Data Collector 

Reddit is a social news site with user-generated content covering nearly every topic in the world. One of the world’s fastest growing sites in the world, Reddit has 50 million active users contributing links, stories, pictures and topics of discussion.

Customers will be able to search by keyword and hot topics. Brands are often unaware of stories percolating about them on the popular site. One recent interesting example is where a Redditor posted an Applebee’s receipt where a pastor refused to tip her waitress based on how much she was tithing, which ultimately ended up being a national news story.

Potential Uses for the Reddit API:

  • Monitoring for brand mentions
  • Crisis communications warning

Stack Overflow on Enterprise Data Collector

Stack Overflow is a community edited Q&A site about computer programming, making it easy for programmers to find answers to questions they have about code. The site has more than 1.5 million registered users and 4 million questions.

Customers will have access to the entire firehose of Stack Overflow Answers and be able to search tags, reputation and comments by keyword. Programmers tag their questions and making it easy to find the content you’re looking for. Currently, the six most popular tags are C#, Java, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, and Android.

Potential Uses for the Stack Overflow API:

  • Monitoring questions and discussion about software and technical brands
  • Monitoring bugs and outages
  • Often requested in conjunction with review sites

Panoramio on Enterprise Data Collector

Panoramio is a photo-sharing website with geotagged content that is layered upon Google Earth and Google Maps. Panoramio allows viewers to see an enhanced view of Google Earth because they can see other photos taken in the area.

Customers will be able to use a bounding box to view photos within a certain location. We have consistently found that our customers are eager for more social data with geotagged content.

Potential Uses for the Panoramio API:

  • Monitor social activity within a certain geographic area

Plurk on Enterprise Data Collector

Plurk is a microblogging site that allows users to communicate in posts with 210 characters and emoticons. Plurk has more than 1 million active users that post 3 million “Plurks” each day. Plurk is one of the more popular social networks in Taiwan and also has a strong presence in Hong Kong, Singapore, Philippines and India. Gnip customers will be able to search for keywords within posts.

Potential Uses for the Plurk API:

  • Monitoring for brand mentions, with a particular focus on certain Asian countries
  • Understanding trending content

If you’re interested in learning more about these additional sources on Enterprise Data Collector, please contact info@gnip.com for more information.

Power Up Those Analytics: Alteryx Gets Plugged In

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Earlier this morning, George Mathew – President & COO of Alteryx – announced during his speech at the Inspire 2013 conference that Alteryx is now a Plugged In To Gnip partner.

The journey of this partnership is one that we’ve enjoyed, and it has been a natural fit from the beginning. Alteryx is a desktop-to-cloud analytics solution widely recognized for both ease of use (even across a wide range of user skills) – as well as powerful capabilities that can handle complex problems. With those characteristics, an integration with social media data just made sense!

To top it off, Alteryx has an office and a vocal presence here in Boulder, so we’ve gotten to know many of the members of their team, and have been consistently impressed with their enthusiasm for big, social data and – most importantly – the creative and valuable insights that the right analytics tool can derive from that data.

The release of Alteryx Strategic Analytics 8.5 is a great example of what this partnership means for enterprises that need to incorporate social analysis quickly and simply. Within 8.5, users benefit from a pre-built integration with Gnip. As an Alteryx user, you enter your Gnip credentials within the Alteryx tool to access your Twitter stream. You can then plug that social analysis tool into the multi-step algorithm or joined data analytics you are creating. This type of integration enables business users from across an entire enterprise to leverage social data in their everyday decision making by simply adding this tool to their analytic workflow.

We’re very excited to have Alteryx in our Plugged In program, and look forward to working together.

Adobe “Plugs In” to the Gnip Partner Program

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Gnip is proud to announce that Adobe has joined our Plugged In To Gnip partner program today.

While Adobe is known for leadership in many areas of multimedia and creativity software, the Gnip partnership is in support of their social marketing management platform. As you may have seen in their recent and hilarious commercial, Adobe Social aims to “Measure ROI on social media. Definitely.” And they have made a distinct investment in building a scalable social marketing solution that can do so. That investment depends on reliable social data and requires trust and partnership in working with their social data provider.

As a Certified Twitter Product, Adobe meets Twitter’s high criteria for Twitter certification.

As a Plugged In To Gnip partner, Adobe is recognized for meeting our high standard of reliable, compliant and sustainable access to all social media that fuels their product. Not only does Gnip provide Adobe’s mission-critical Twitter data, we also support their customers’ need for other social sources including Disqus, Tumblr, WordPress, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit.

We are incredibly proud that Adobe entrusts to Gnip the task of delivering, normalizing and supporting the data that fuels Adobe Social and we’re excited at the continuing closeness this partnership brings. If you’re at Adobe Summit 2013 this Thursday, you can see our own Chris Moody speaking with Adobe and Kelley Blue Book about the importance of the right social data.

You can also learn more in the press announcement or at http://gnip.com/plugged_in/adobe/.

Gnip’s Highlight Reel for 2012

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Happy Holidays From Gnip

As Gnip reflects upon 2012, it’s exciting to see what we’ve accomplished with the help of our many amazing partners and customers. It was an important year for us and the social data ecosystem at large. This year we have been in awe about how people are using social data in numerous fields and applications, and we know that social data is at the tip of the iceberg. While we’re proud of what 2012 meant for Gnip, we’re even more thrilled to think about what is ahead for both Gnip and social data in 2013.

Here were our company’s highlights in 2012!

January
Gnip launches WordPress.com, WordPress.org and Intense Debate Firehoses. Partners with Automattic to make the full firehoses of social data from WordPress and Intense Debate available for the first time ever.

February
Gnip offers enhanced filtering for PowerTrack for Twitter.

Gnip launches 30-Day Replay for Twitter – Gnip launches the first historical Twitter product making the past 30 days of Twitter social data available for the first time ever.

Gnip makes the Disqus firehose available for the first time, making rich comment data available from the largest commenting platform.

March
Gnip creates new Twitter filtering operators to receive only Retweets or to receive only a sampling of Tweets matching a rule set.

April
Gnip launches the full firehose from Tumblr, one of the fastest growing social networks in the world.

May
Gnip offers the ability to filter Twitter by bios making it even easier for companies to find the data from a targeted audience.

June
Big data? Gnip’s got it. We start delivering 100 billion social data activities each month to our clients.

Gnip hosts Big Boulder, the world’s first conference on social data. Two days of 16 sessions with 32 speakers coming together to talk about the social data ecosystem.

In one of the most vibrant tech communities in the US, Gnip is named a Colorado Company to Watch.

July
Gnip launches data stories, our interviews with the people changing the world through social data.

We moved into a new office, doubling our office space to accomodate our growing staff.

August
Gnip has seen incredible growth from the financial markets incorporating social data into their prediction models. Gnip’s Seth McGuire visits SquawkBox to talk social data and the stock market.

Twitter announces it’s official Twitter Certified Products and names Gnip a Certified Data Reseller.

Continuing to make it easier to ensure you only get the Twitter data you want to receive, Gnip offers new Twitter Filtering Options offering new geo operators and user operators.

Gnip states what we believe – “We believe social data has unlimited value and near limitless application. We begin almost every conversation with potential customers and partners with this simple statement because it best exemplifies why we exist as a company. More importantly, this refrain helps keep us focused on our ultimate goal: to be the source of record for all public social conversation.”

September
Gnip launches Historical PowerTrack for Twitter making the full Twitter archive available for the first time in history. We believe this is the largest record of human behavior in history, and we think the possibilities are endless.

October
Being in the business more than four years and delivering 100 billion social data activities a month, we have some tricks up our sleeves. We created Gnip’s Engineering blog to share some of the lessons we’re learning.

Gnip makes monitoring YouTube comments even easier by launching a YouTube Comments API.

Gnip customer Union Metrics becomes the first recognized analytics provider by Tumblr.

November
Gnip announces a partnership with Hottolink, Japan’s largest social media monitoring firm.

Tumblr is the 10th largest site in the world, and continues to see demand for Tumblr social data. To accommodate this, Gnip creates PowerTrack for Tumblr making it even easier to hone in on the content they want.

Gnip is named a best place to work by the Denver Business Journal and (we’re hiring).

December
Gnip launches Plugged In To Gnip, our partner program to recognize our partners providing comprehensive, reliable and sustainable social data. You can read what our partners are saying about their partnerships with Gnip.

Bad Data, the Right Data and Le Data

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Gnip believes social data can change the world and our leadership team has been writing about data in O’Reilly, speaking at the Sentiment Symposium and at LeWeb. We wanted to share what they were talking about.

Bad Data by O'Reilly

Gnip CEO Jud Valeski wrote a chapter in the recently released O’Reilly handbook “Bad Data” by Ethan McCullum. Jud wrote the chapter called “Social Data: Erasable Ink?” about how the evolving social media landscape is challenging expectations about how people interact with social data and who owns it. Gnip is committed to providing terms-of-service compliant social data and this chapter talks about the expectations around social data and how the various players are managing them.

 

 

 

Our COO Chris Moody speaking at the Sentiment Symposium on “Building Sentiment Analysis on the Right Social Data”

Building Sentiment Analysis on the Right Social Data (Chris Moody, Gnip) from Seth Grimes on Vimeo.

Jud being interviewed by Robert Scoble at LeWeb

What Our Partners Are Saying About Plugged In To Gnip

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Yesterday we launched Plugged In To Gnip, our partner program to recognize our partners providing comprehensive, reliable and sustainable social data. Our COO Chris Moody wrote about what Plugged In To Gnip means for us yesterday, but we wanted to share what our partners were saying about the program and what it means to them.

FirstRain is Proud to be Plugged In To GNIP!

And critical to the success of FirstTweets was, first, to have comprehensive, authorized and reliable access to the Twitter firehose—and for this FirstRain relies on Gnip. Gnip is the world’s largest and most trusted provider of social media data, and in addition to being a fantastic team of innovative social data ninjas, they’ve been terrific partners in our quest to transform the way corporate enterprises drive revenue through Web and Social customer intelligence and analytics beyond social monitoring.

Netbase and Gnip: Maintaining Streams of Quality Content

When I describe my job, I borrow from my childhood near Pittsburgh and explain that if NetBase were a steel mill, I’d be the guy making sure we have trains and barges bringing in high-quality iron ore and the other raw materials we need to make high-quality steel. Gnip, whose Plugged In program we are proud to have joined from its launch, operates one of the biggest, fastest “trains” delivering raw data to us. Out of the roughly 50 million social media postings we analyze and index each day, the majority come from Twitter and we rely on Gnip’s ability to operate a TGV-scale delivery platform. The TGV, if you don’t know that term, is France’s Tres Grande Vitesse, the fastest railway in the world. We also depend on Gnip for Disqus blog comments and much more. But they’re not just filling up buckets for us – Gnip adds value.

Although the TGV has a switching system, its scale is microscopic compared with the “switching” we need from our content suppliers. Although in many cases we tell our supplier “Give us everything you have,” we are able to rely on some of them, including Gnip, to filter the content to ensure that our customers receive 100 percent of the relevant tweets, posts and articles and as little spam and junk as possible. That makes them more a supplier of raw material; it makes them a partner. We also rely on them to put in place the technical and business processes to ensure that we are in compliance with licensing and other requirements created by the owners and distributors of the data they supply – and to help our customers do the same. Just keeping up with those processes and requirements is a challenge as the social media ecosystem evolves and matures.

Gnip Touts Big Data Partnerships

“Social data is a new and incredibly exciting dataset that our customers are beginning to leverage within IBM InfoSphere BigInsights and other IBM products,” said Bruce Weed, IBM big data program director, in a statement. “Via the Plugged In To Gnip business partner program, we make it incredibly easy for them to access that social data.”

Union Metrics is Proud to be Plugged In To Gnip

What else does this partnership mean? It means a number of things, but what’s most important to you – our valued customers – is that all our social analytics products are built on the highest quality, most comprehensive and reliable social data. We are committed to bringing you the data that you need to be successful with social media and our partnership with Gnip helps make that possible; full coverage, high-quality data is at the heart of all our analytics solutions.

Infochimps Plugged In To Gnip

Getting a handle on the immense volume of data produced by the social networks provided by Gnip often requires a sophisticated data infrastructure for the processing and control of feeds.  As a partner in providing solutions to customers needing to extract insight from this treasure trove of data, Infochimps can help by setting up customers with a best in class data platform for refining and working with Gnip’s feeds.

Joining Forces: BrandWatch Collaboration With Gnip 

As a Gnip partner, the social data we access through our Twitter Firehose integration is certified as the most comprehensive, reliable and sustainable source of social data. So in other words, as a Brandwatch client, this has always assured you that the insights you receive are based on the most complete access available for this data – period.

Clarabridge Partners with Gnip to Bring Real-Time Monitoring of Social Media Data to Customer Experience

We recognize that consumers are increasingly looking to social media as a critical means of communication, and businesses need to stay on top of consumer feedback in real time,” said Sid Banerjee, CEO, Clarabridge. “As a member of Gnip’s Plugged In program, our customers will be able to collect, analyze, operationalize and measure social media data in real time, as well as engage directly back with the customer. We are excited to partner with Gnip and enable Clarabridge customers to forge real and direct relationships with their consumers and elevate the customer experience they provide.

Greenplum Plugs In To Gnip

With data from social media platforms accounting for an ever-increasing amount of the Big Data deluge, collecting that data becomes an ever-moving target. As social networks proliferate, so do the respective services’ APIs and access policies. Social media aggregator Gnip aims to simplify the process, allowing businesses to focus on reaping social data insight, rather than tracking which services are hot, which are not, and which have changed their API policies.

Coinciding with its OpenChorus initiative, Greenplum announced a partnership with Gnip recently to make the company’s APIs accessible through the Greenplum platform. As Gnip details in its new Plugged In To Gnip campaign, users of Greenplum Chorus, UAP, Database, and HD can now easily access data from the Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, StockTwits and Disqus firehoses.

uberVU is now Plugged In to Gnip

As an inaugural member of Gnip’s Plugged In program, this certifies that we are accessing social data, like Twitter, through the most comprehensive, reliable and sustainable source of social data. Now, our customers can look to this certification as an assurance that the insights they receive are based on the most complete access available for this data – period. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have the firehose.

UberVu Drinking from the Gnip Firehose

Plugged In To Gnip: Shining A Light On Social Data

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Plugged In To Gnip

Today we announced our Plugged In To Gnip partnership program. Although this is an important milestone for our company, we believe this program clearly marks the beginning of new era in the quickly maturing social data ecosystem and that the benefits of today’s announcement will be felt by the end users of social data analysis for years to come.

As we’ve often said, we believe social data has unlimited value and near limitless application. Countless companies, governments, and researchers are now making critical decisions based upon this data. Much of the emphasis across these applications to date has been on the analysis and insights layer. At the same time, there has been clear recognition that the analysis and insights derived from these various solutions are only as good as the underlying social data they are built upon.

In the early days of the ecosystem, the options for accessing reliable, sustainable, and comprehensive social data were very limited. Solution providers that were building upon a sound data layer didn’t want to reveal their proprietary data acquisition secrets. Providers that did not have sound solution, wanted to avoid the data discussion all together. As a result, companies were talking about their solutions without shining a light on the critical data layer portion of the equation.

If social data is going to reach its full potential, the underlying data must be reliable, sustainable, and complete. As an industry we must shine a light on social data so that the data layer is analyzed and scrutinized as much as the application itself. As the world’s largest provider of social data, Gnip has a unique view of the ecosystem and of the organizations that are committed to highest level of social data integrity. At its core, the Plugged In program is a way for us to collaborate with these advanced data organizations to keep driving the ecosystem forward.

There are lots of benefits to partners participating in the program including early access to new data and new features. But, the big winner is the end user. Plugged In To Gnip partners can confidently certify to their end users that they have complete and authorized access to the best social data in the world.