Tag Archives: flickr

Customer Spotlight – MutualMind

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Like many startups seeking to enter and capitalize on the rising social media marketplace, timing is everything. MutualMind was no exception: getting their enterprise social media management product to market in a timely manner was crucial to the success of their business. MutualMind provides an enterprise social media intelligence and management system that monitors, analyzes, and promotes brands on social networks and helps increase social media ROI. The platform enables customers to listen to discussion on the social web, gauge sentiment, track competitors, identify and engage with influencers, and use resulting insights to improve their overall brand strategy.

“Through their social media API, Gnip helped us push our product to market six months ahead of schedule, enabling us to capitalize on the social media intelligence space. This allowed MutualMind to focus on the core value it adds by providing advanced analytics, seamless engagement, and enterprise-grade social management capabilities.”

- Babar Bhatti
CEO, MutualMind

By selecting Gnip as their data delivery partner, MutualMind was able to get their product to market six months ahead of schedule. Today, MutualMind processes tens of millions of data activities per month using multiple sources from Gnip including premium Twitter data, YouTube, Flickr, and more.
 
Get the full detail, read the success story here.

Social Media in Natural Disasters

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Gnip is located in Boulder, CO, and we’re unfortunately experiencing a spate of serious wildfires as we wind Summer down. Social media has been a crucial source of information for the community here over the past week as we have collectively Tweeted, Flickred, YouTubed and Facebooked our experiences. Mashups depicting the fires and associated social media quickly started emerging after the fires started. VisionLink (a Gnip customer) produced the most useful aggregated map of official boundary & placemark data, coupled with social media delivered by Gnip (click the “Feeds” section along the left-side to toggle social media); screenshot below.

Visionlink Gnip Social Media Map

With Gnip, they started displaying geo-located Tweets, then added Flickr photos with the flip of a switch. No new messy integrations that required learning a new API with all of it’s rate limiting, formatting, and delivery protocol nuances. Simple selection of data sources they deemed relevant to informing a community reacting, real-time, to a disaster.

It was great to see a firm focus on their core value proposition (official disaster relief data), and quickly integrate relevant social media without all the fuss.

Our thoughts are with everyone who was impacted by the fires.

Gnip Platform Update – Now For Authenticated Data Services

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The Gnip Platform originally was built to support accessing public services and data.  In response to customer requests we soft launched support for authenticated data services over the summer and now we have fully rolled out the new service.   The difference between public and authenticated data services seems trivial, but in practice the differences are very important since authenticated services represent either business level arrangements between companies or private data access.   The new Gnip capabilities supports both of these scenarios.

As part of the new service Gnip also provides dedicated integration capacity for companies as we now are able to segment individually managed nodes on our platform for specific company accounts.   This means that a company with a developer key on Flickr, a whitelist account on Twitter, an application key on Facebook and a developer key on YouTube receives dedicated capacity on the Gnip platform to support all their data integration requirements.

Gnip will also continue to maintain the existing public data integration services which do not require authentication for access and distribution, and we expect most companies with use a blend of our data integration services.

Using the new support for authenticated data service requires contacting us at sales@gnip.com so we can enable your account. Please contact us today to leverage your existing whitelisting or authenticated account on Flickr, YouTube, Twitter or other APIs and feeds.

Pushing and Polling Data Differences in Approach on the Gnip platform

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Obviously we have some understanding on the concepts of pushing and polling of data from service endpoints since we basically founded a company on the premise that the world needed a middleware push data service.    Over the last year we have had a lot of success with the push model, but we also learned that for many reasons we also need to work with services via a polling approach.   For this reason our latest v2.1 includes the Gnip Service Polling feature so that we can work with any service using push, poll or a mixed approach.

Now, the really great thing for users of the Gnip platform is that how Gnip collects data is mostly abstracted away.   Every end user developer or company has the option to tell Gnip where to push data that you have set up filters or have a subscription.   We also realize not everyone has an IT setup to handle push so we have always provided the option for HTTP GET support that lets people grab data from a Gnip generated URL for your filters.

One place where the way Gnip collects data can make a difference, at this time, for our users is the expected latency of data.  Latency here refers to the time between the activity happening (i.e. Bob posted a photo, Susie made a comment, etc) and the time it hits the Gnip platform to be delivered to our awaiting users.     Here are some basic expectation setting thoughts.

PUSH services: When we have push services the latency experience is usually under 60 seconds, but we know that this is not always the case sense sometimes the services can back-up during heavy usage and latency can spike to minutes or even hours.   Still, when the services that push to us are running normal it is reasonable to expect 60 second latency or better and this is consistent for both the Community and Standard Edition of the Gnip platform.

POLLED services:   When Gnip is using our polling service to collect data the latency can vary from service to service based on a few factors

a) How often we hit an endpoint (say 5 times per second)

b) How many rules we have to schedule for execution against the endpoint (say over 70 million on YouTube)

c) How often we execute a specific rule (i.e. every 10 minutes).     Right now with the Community edition of the Gnip platform we are setting rule execution by default at 10 minute intervals and people need to have this in mind with their expectation for data flow from any given publisher.

Expectations for POLLING in the Community Edition: So I am sure some people who just read the above stopped and said “Why 10 minutes?”  Well we chose to focus on “breadth of data ” as the initial use case for polling.   Also, the 10 minute interval is for the Community edition (aka: the free version).   We have the complete ability to turn the dial and use the smarts built into the polling service feature we can execute the right rules faster (i.e. every 60 seconds or faster for popular terms and every 10, 20, etc minutes or more for less popular ones).    The key issue here is that for very prolific posting people or very common keyword rules (i.e. “obama”, “http”, “google”) there can be more posts that exist in the 10 minute default time-frame then we can collect in a single poll from the service endpoint.

For now the default expectation for our Community edition platform users should be a 10 minute execution interval for all rules when using any data publisher that is polled, which is consistent with the experience during our v2.1 Beta.    If your project or company needs something a bit more snappy with the data publishers that are polled then contact us at info@gnip.com or contact me directly at shane@gnip.com as these use cases require the Standard Edition of the Gnip platform.

Current pushed services on the platform include:  WordPress, Identi.ca, Intense Debate, Twitter, Seesmic,  Digg, and Delicious

Current polled services on the platform include:   Clipmarks, Dailymotion, deviantART, diigo, Flickr, Flixster, Fotolog, Friendfeed, Gamespot, Hulu, iLike, Multiply, Photobucket, Plurk, reddit, SlideShare, Smugmug, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Vimeo, Webshots, Xanga, and YouTube

New Flickr Gnip Publisher Available on http://api.gnip.com

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This is one people have asked about a lot.   We just pushed out a new publisher today for Flickr.

The new Flickr Publisher supports the Gnip TAG rule-type and allows people to easily integrate data from the Flickr API using the Gnip platform.     In the near future we plan to add support for the Gnip ACTOR rule-type, so stay tuned.   In the mean time it is very easy to define the tags that match your interests.  Not sure what tags to use, just check out some of the most popular tags being used on Flickr.

Check it out on http://api.gnip.com and go use Gnip to integrate some data from Flickr!

Gnip Pushed a New Platform Release This Week

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We just pushed out a new release this week that includes new publishers and capabilities. Here is a summary of the release highlights. Enjoy!

  • New YouTube publisher: Do you need an easy way to access, filter and integrate YouTube content to your web application or website? Gnip now provides a YouTube publisher so go create some new filters and start integrating YouTube based content.
  • New Flickr publisher: Our first Flickr publisher had some issues with data consistency and could almost be described as broken. We built a brand new Flickr publisher to provide better access to content from Flickr. Creating filters is a snap so go grab some Flickr content.
  • Now publisher information can be shared across accounts: When multiple developers are using Gnip to integrate web APIs and feeds it sometimes is useful to see other filters as examples. Sharing allows a user to see publisher activity and statistics, but does grant the ability to edit or delete.
  • New Data Producer Analytics Dashboard: If your company is pushing content through Gnip we understand it is important to see how, where and who is accessing the content using our platform and with this release we have added a web-based data producer analytics dashboard. This is a beta feature, not where we want it yet, and we have some incomplete data issues. However, we wanted to get something available and then iterate based on feedback. If you are a data producer let us know how to take this forward. The current version provides access to the complete list of filters created against a publisher and the information can be downloaded in XML or CSV format

Also, we have a few things we are working on for upcoming releases:

  • Gnip Polling: Our new Flickr and YouTube publishers both leverage our new Gnip Polling service, which we have started using internally for access to content that is not available via our push infrastructure. We plan to make this feature available externally to customers in the future, so stay tuned or contact us if you want to learn more.
  • User generated publishers from RSS Feeds: We are going to open up the system so anyone can create new publishers from RSS Feeds. This new feature makes it easy to access, filter and integrate tons of web based content.
  • Field level mapping on RSS feeds: A lot of times the field naming of RSS feeds across different endpoints does not map to the way the field is named in your company. This new feature will allow the editing and mapping at the individual field level to support normalization across multiple feeds.
  • Filter rule batch updates: When your filters start to get big adding lots of new rules can be a challenge. Based on direct customer feedback it will soon be possible to batch upload filter rules.

Solution Spotlight: Soup.io is Now Using Gnip

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Soup.io is now using the Gnip messaging platform for their web API data integration needs. Welcome Soup.io!

Who is Soup.io?
Soup.io provides a easy to use micro-blogging and lifestream service that serves as an aggregator for your public social media feeds. Visit their website at http://www.soup.io/or their blog at http://updates.soup.io/ to learn more.

Real-world results Soup.io says they are realizing from using Gnip
Soup.io is using Gnip to provide data integration to Twitter, and they have seen a reduction in the latency for their Twitter integration (i.e. the time elapsed for a tweet to show up in the Soup.io service) since moving to Gnip. Now Soup.io users should see their Twitter notices show up within a minute of them being sent on the Twitter service. Since Gnip also provides data streams from many other providers as well (Flickr, Delicious, etc) Soup.io is working to use Gnip as the way to access and integrate to these services in the future.

Solution Spotlight: Strands Now Using Gnip

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Strands is the newest company using the Gnip messaging platform for their web API data integration needs. Welcome Strands and thank you to Aaron for sharing what the team is doing!

Who is Strands?
Strands develops technologies to better understand people’s taste and help them discover things they like and didn’t know about. Strands has created a social recommendation engine that is able to provide real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices. This enables users to discover new things, based on their online, offline and mobile activities. The Strands.com website helps people discover new things from other people. Visit http://www.strands.com to learn more.

Real-world results Strands says they are realizing from using Gnip
Strands.com is now able to give people updates faster and more reliably. In addition, Strands has seen reduced load on their system by not having to poll for updates on sites like Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, and Digg. Gnip allows Strands to receive push data from several of these sites, and at a minimum receive notifications when a user on these sites has made an update.

Web APIs of All Shapes and Sizes

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Not all APIs have the same capabilities and therefore they provide different levels of access to events, procedures and data. Seems obvious, but you would not think that based on the normal questions we see from people. In fact we have found that APIs can be like a lot like apples and oranges. So, with the number of available APIs growing, at a rate that can be more than 60 per month we thought people would benefit from some simple way to think of API categorization based on how they expose events and data.

We work with a large variety of APIs from a variety of service providers and have noticed that most APIs fall into a few descriptive types based on how they expose events and data. The following are the main ways we are starting to look at APIs.

  • Fire hose or “full stream”. Identi.ca and Twitter are two examples, but Flickr also has a fire hose
  • User-based stream: These services do not directly expose a full stream, but instead give people a way to assemble an aggregate stream based on a list of users. Flickr again is a good example and there are many others.
  • Activity-based Tag-based and “other”: The main way to work with these services is usually some defined activity (tag, bookmark, etc) access to information or pre-defined streams based on feeds. An example would be Delicious, which allows multiple methods to access information by APIs and feeds.

This bi-frication in API types is something people should keep in mind when they want to access a service for some specific need. If you need to get events and data for a specific need then obviously the behavior of the API is going to impact your approach. And of course here at Gnip we are hard at work trying to provide consistent approaches across all types of APIs, so back to work!

What We Are Up to At Gnip

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As the newest member of the Gnip team I have noticed that people are asking a lot of the same questions about what we are doing at Gnip and what are the ways people can use our services in their business.

What we do

Gnip provides an extensible messaging platform that allows for the publishing or subscribing of events and data from across the Internet, which makes data portability exponentially less painful and more automatic once it is set up. Because Gnip is being built as a platform of capabilities and not a web application the core services are instantly useful for multiple scenarios, including data producers, data consumers and any custom web applications. Gnip already is being used with many of the most popular Internet data sources, including Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, Digg, and Plaxo.

How to use Gnip

So, who is the target user of Gnip? It is a developer, as the platform is not a consumer-oriented web application, but a set of services meant to be used by a developer or an IT department for a set of core use cases.

  • Data Consumers: You’ve built your pollers, let us tell you when and where to fire them. Avoid throttling and decrease latency from hours to seconds.
  • Data Producers: Push your data to us and reduce API traffic by an order of magnitude while increasing distribution through aggregators.
  • Custom web applications: You want to embed or publish content to be used in your own application or for a third-party application. Decide who, or what, you care about for any Publisher, give us an end-point, and we push the data to you so you can solve your business use cases, such as customer service websites, corporate websites, blogs, or any web application.

Get started now

By leveraging the Gnip APIs, developers can easily design reusable services, such as, push-based notifications, smart filters and data streams that can be used for all your web applications to make them better. Are you a developer? Give the new 2.0 version a try!