Gnip, Inc.
Available inEnglish
Founded2008
HeadquartersBoulder, Colorado, United States
Area servedWorldwide
Founder(s)Jud Valeski and Eric Marcoullier
IndustrySocial Media API Aggregation
URL[1]

Gnip, Inc. was a social media API aggregation company that was purchased by Twitter in 2014. Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, it provided data from dozens of social media websites via a single API. Gnip was among the first social media API aggregation services.

Gnip is known as an early influencer in building the real-time web.[1] The company has also been instrumental in defining relevant web standards: Gnip's co-founder Eric Marcoullier actively advocated for adoption of open web standards, and helped define the new Activity Streams format for web data.

Subsequent to a 2010 data licensing agreement with Twitter Inc, Twitter purchased Gnip in April 2014.[2]

History

Gnip was founded by Jud Valeski and Eric Marcoullier with an initial investment of $1 million.[3] The company was based on the premise that collecting data from many social APIs simultaneously is tedious and time-consuming. It dubbed itself the "Grand Central Station for the Social Web" shortly after launch.[1] Although the company launched with just a few basic features such as notifications,[4] the product was designed to act as an intermediary to simplify the collection of social media data.[5] The company used the tagline "making data portability suck less."[6]

By the end of 2008, Gnip had raised $3.5 million in Series B funding from investors such as the Foundry Group and First Round Capital.[7][8] The service was used for projects like collecting huge volumes of data for analyzing Twitter clients.[9]

In 2009, Gnip launched a Push API.[10] In September, Gnip underwent a significant product overhaul accompanied by an internal restructuring of resources.[11]

In 2010, Gnip launched their new and revised social media data collection product[12] and released a manual describing use cases and significance of Twitter Inc's streaming API.[13] Gnip's sources included Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Google Buzz, Vimeo, and others.[14]

In April 2014, Gnip was acquired by Twitter for $134.1 million in mostly cash and some stock.[15]

References

  1. ^ a b "Gnip: Grand Central Station for the Social Web". readwriteweb.com. Archived from the original on 2012-10-08. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  2. ^ Gerry Shih and Supantha Mukherjee (15 April 2014). "Twitter buys social data provider Gnip, stock soars". Reuters. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  3. ^ "MyBlogLog Founder To Launch New Startup Gnip With $1 Million In Funding". TechCrunch. 14 March 2008. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  4. ^ "Gnip to bridge the data divide for noisy Web services". CNET. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  5. ^ "Gnip 2.0 Launches, With A Business Model". TechCrunch. October 2008. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  6. ^ "Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards". Foundry Group. July 2008. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  7. ^ "Gigaom | Gnip Raises $3.5 Million". gigaom.com. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  8. ^ "Data-sharing service Gnip raises $3.5 million | VentureBeat | | by Eric Eldon". venturebeat.com. 4 November 2008. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  9. ^ Top Twitter Clients Revealed Archived June 25, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
  10. ^ "Gnip Launches Push API To Create Real-Time Stream Of Business Data". TechCrunch. 9 July 2009. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  11. ^ "Gnip Clips 60 Percent Of Staff". TechCrunch. 28 September 2009.
  12. ^ "The Best SLA I've Seen In A While - Feld Thoughts". feld.com. 25 March 2010. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  13. ^ "Gnip's Manual On The Twitter Streaming API". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  14. ^ "Gnip - Sources". gnip.com. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
  15. ^ Koh, Yoree (11 August 2014). "Twitter Paid $134 Million for Data Partner Gnip - Digits". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2017-09-16.
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