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.

We continue to work on enriching the Gnip schema to provide second level meta-data on user generated activities .  Given we push 10s to 100s of of millions of activities around daily supporting more meta-data means a bit of work beyond just updating our schema.

Today we rolled out meta-data updates to the <actor> and <to> elements of the Gnip schema.   The updates today are new optional attributes that provide a place to map additional user information that is available on some social media services like Twitter and others.    Initially we will just add the new meta-data to activities where the information is available inline with activities and then in the near future we are adding more platform features to support the scenario where a second API call is required to add this meta-data to the activity.

Starting today the <actor> element has support for the numeric userID, friends, followers, and posts.   In addition, we are now mapping the fullname and username to individual attributes in order to better support services that allow end users to create custom screen names and change those names.   The <to> element was updated to provide a new attribute for numeric userID.

Overview of updates to <actor> and <to> elements of Gnip schema:

• <actor> is the person who performed the activity on the service
  • <posts> is the number of updates made by the user
  • <followers> is the number of people following the user
  • <friends> is the number of people the user has friended
  • <fullname> is the descriptive name or screen name of the user
  • <username> is the username of the user on the service
  • <uid> the unique numeric ID for the user on the service
  • <metaURL> is the user profile link on the service

• <to> is the person who the activity is in response
  • <uid> the unique numeric ID for the user on the service
  • <metaURL> is the user profile link on the servic

As we posted last month there are some changes coming to the way we license use of the Gnip platform.  See: Gnip Licensing Changes Coming in August.

These updates will be put in place this Friday, August 28th.    The impact of the new licensing will be the following for our existing users.

1. The Gnip Community Edition license will be disabled as it is no longer being offered.   Accounts that were created before August 1st will be set to inactive and no longer will be able to access the Gnip API or Developer Website.   If your company is in the process of evaluating Gnip for a commercial project and needs a longer amount of time to complete your project please contact us at info@gnip.com and we can extend your account on a longer trial.
2. Gnip Standard Edition user accounts using the Commercial, Non-profit and Startup partner license options will continue to be available as they are not impacted by the change on Friday.   If you are a standard edition user and we accidentally your disable your account on Friday please contact us at info@gnip.com and we will reactivate the account.
3. New users who created an account starting after August 1st will receive an email notification on the day their 30-day trial expires informing them they need to contact Gnip to obtain the appropriate license for their commercial, non-profit or partner use case.

We appreciate all the companies and developers who have built solutions using Gnip and look forward to continuing to deliver real-time data to power these solutions.   By making these adjustments in our licensing we will be able to focus on innovating the Gnip Platform and supporting the many companies and partners we are fortunate to work with every day.

Every once in awhile there are opportunities to make a real difference in the industry.   301works.org is just such an opportunity for Gnip and the companies we are teaming up with to launch a very needed independent URL mapping directory service.

First, many thanks to Adjix, awe.sm, betaworks, bit.ly, Cligs,  URLizer, and urlShort who have joined with us to launch this new organization.  And. you can read the actual 301works announcement that is posted on Gnip.com

Why is Gnip involved?  We are part of the Internet software community and most of us are also active social media users.   While there is debate on the pros and cons of short URLs in some parts of the industry it is obvious that over the last few years there has been a huge growth in the adoption of short URL formats across the web and increasingly custom short URLs are being used by businesses and individuals.

People generate short URLs everyday and they need to know that these mappings will continue to function as they were intended when generated, that their mappings will be available for them to use in the future, and that their privacy preferences will be respected. With short URL formats having reached general acceptance by millions of users in their daily activities there was a need for the industry to ensure the connections provided by these mappings exist over time.

In providing the technology to power the 301works solution Gnip is ensuring that the social connections and data represented by the millions of URL mappings done everyday continue to be available across the web.

We are thrilled to be able to participate and to do our part in helping sustain and grow an open web.

We always get some interesting requests for doing additional processing on data sources.   Some of these are addressed using Gnip filters, but others do not really fit the filter model.   In able to support richer or more complex data processsing we have built some additional features into the Gnip platform.   The first new publisher using some of these new features is “Digg-2000“.

Digg-2000 Publisher — What is it?

Lots of people submit stories to Digg and lots of other people Digg the stories which allows more popular information to rise to the top in being discoverable.    Several Gnip customers asked if we could make it possible for them to only receive stories that had a specific number of Diggs.   We asked Digg about the idea and they said it sounded great since they have a Twitter account that provides a similar type of feature, so the Digg-2000 Gnip publisher was born.

Digg-2000 Publisher — How it works?

On the Gnip platform we have set up a publisher that is listening to activities on Digg.

• When new stories are submitted to Digg we pick those new activites up along with the Digg count on the story and they are posted to the standard Gnip Digg publisher.
• With every new Digg on a story we increment our tracking of the story and when we hit 2000 diggs we re-post the original story to the Digg-2000 publisher.
• The configuration of the Digg-2000 publisher allows for us to turn two different dials.
  • The default configuration only will re-post stories that were first posted on Digg in the last two days.   This means we are looking for current active stories and not stories that were posted months ago and through a slow and steady interest finally hit 2000 Diggs.
  • The default configuration re-posts at 2000 Diggs.   This can be set to any number of Diggs — 100, 1000, 2000, etc.

Gnip has offered the same basic licensing options since we launched the 2.0 version of the platform last September.   During that year we have learned a lot about how companies and individual developers use the Gnip platform to discover, access, integrate and filter social and business data for their applications.     In that time the daily volume of activities flowing across the platform has grown from thousands of activities across a handful of services to 100 to 150 million activities in a given day across almost forty different data sources.

Gnip Platform License Updates:  In the second half of August Gnip will introduce several changes to our licensing options that will impact existing users and new users

• Gnip will be provide several licensing options for the Standard Edition service
  • Commercial license:  This is the default license for all commercial uses of the Gnip Platform
  • Non-profit license:  This option will be available to companies and organizations with an appropriate 501(c) status
  • Startup Partner license:  This option is available to companies that meet the qualification terms of the partner program.
  • Trial license:  This option will be the default experience for new users and provide 30 days to evaluate the platform.
• The Community Edition of the Gnip Platform will being retired since we discovered over the last year that the TOS for the Community Edition made the option a poor fit for real-world company use cases.   We believe any small company using the Gnip Platform Community Edition should be able to move to our Startup Partner Program.

Impact on existing and new users: The most obvious change for new users that sign up after these licensing updates is that their accounts will be active for 30 days.   All existing users on the Gnip Platform will have their existing accounts convert to a 30 day trial account when the new licensing is rolled out during the second half of August.

Planning for the licensing updates: If your company meets any of the regular license options please contact us at sales@gnip.com or info@gnip.com to discuss moving to the Commercial, Non-profit or Startup Partner licenses.

The Gnip product offerings are growing today as we officially announce a new Push API Service that will help companies more quickly and effectively deliver data to their customers, partners and affiliates.  (See the TechCrunch article: Gnip Launches Push API To Create Real-Time Stream Of Business Data )

This new offering leverages the Gnip SaaS Integration Platform but is provided as a complete white-label and embeddable solution adding real-time push to an existing infrastructure.  The main capabilities include the following:

• Push Endpoint Management: Easily register service endpoints and APIs to create alternative Push endpoints that are powered by the Gnip platform.
• Real-time Data Delivery: Complete white-label approach allows for company defined URLs to be enhanced for real-time data delivery. Reduce your data latency and infrastructure costs while maintaining control of data access and offloading the delivery to Gnip
• Reporting Dashboard: Access important metrics and usage information for service endpoints through a statistics API or a web-based dashboard

A company would be able to add the Push API Service  to their existing infrastructure in hours or days with a few steps.

1. Tell us how you want Gnip to access your data and APIs as we have several methods depending on your infrastructure
2. Integrate the Gnip Push API Service to your website with complete control of the user experience and branding
3. CNAME the subdomain in order to seamlessly add the Push API Service to your existing infrastructure
4. Track usage of the new Push Service API using a web-based console or stats API

If your company is intersted in learning more about how Gnip can help move your existing repetitive API and website traffic to a more efficient push based approach contact us at info@gnip.com.

Welcome PostRank!

Today Gnip and PostRank announced a new partnership (blog) (press release)that allows companies using the Gnip platform to access the nearly 3 million news articles and stories indexed by PostRank from a million discrete sources every day.  In addition PostRank collects the real-time social interactions with content across dozens of social networks and applications.

Gnip will be providing PostRank as a premium service that requires a subscription.  All of the value added features of the Gnip platform including normalization, rule-based filtering, and push delivery of content are supported with the new Gnip PostRank Data Publisher.   For pricing information contact info@gnip.com or shane@gnip.com

We have some new “Powered by Gnip” badges available for our customers, partners and anyone looking to add something pretty to their website.

The badges are available on our website here: http://www.gnip.com/partners

We have three styles to chose from depending on your color preference, and here is the orange/white style.

The real-time internet is getting more attention and with that attention comes places for people to talk about what it all means.   Since Gnip focuses on devliering data for the real-time web we end up being in on some part of the conversation and many solutions.

If you are planning or thinking about attending one of the upcoming conferences let us know as we will be attending.

1. Real-Time Stream CrunchUp, July 10th, Redwood City, CA

URL: http://www.techcrunch.com/real-time-stream-and-4th-annual-crunchup-at-august-capital/

2. Real-time Web 2009 Conference, July 29th, Mountain View, CA.

URL: http://rtw09.com/