Gnip adds Google+ to social media data stream

Nathan Pensky · October 27, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/20bf

Gnip adds one more social media source to its API data aggregate service

Social media data API Gnip added the business of Google+ to its data stream on Thursday. Gnip will run a natural language keyword search stream from the Google+ API. Gnip serves as a central location for social netowkring API data. Sites that use Gnip's platform can get important data concerning their social media presence, on such sites as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, and now Google +.

Vator News contacted Gnip President and COO Chris Moody to learn more about the company.

Vator News: Why do companies need Gnip?

Moody: I’ll break this into two parts. The first answers the question: “Why do companies need social media data?”
 
The social media data Gnip delivers represent a never-ending stream of human consciousness. The applications for this data are endless and companies are only in the early stages of applying it to their businesses. Right now, companies in industries ranging from Social Media Monitoring and Marketing to Finance, Business Intelligence, and Government are using data from Gnip with different use cases for each industry...
 
The second answers the question: “Why should companies get their social media data from Gnip?” Gnip offers dozens of social media sources with over 100 different streams to choose from, including access to the full firehose from Twitter.
 
Gnip customers don’t have to worry about managing ongoing challenges that come along with managing multiple APIs. We take care of that and provide a single stream in the protocol of their choice. In addition, we enrich the data unwinding short URLs, filtering by language and adding Klout scores. 
We’ve been at this since 2008 and have built a reliable, enterprise-grade infrastructure to deliver the massive amounts of data flowing through our system. We work closely with each publisher to comply with all publisher Terms of Service, giving our customers the peace of mind of knowing that they are building their businesses on a solid and predictable foundation.
 
How does your technology work, in layman's terms?
 
Gnip developed the first enterprise-grade platform to reliably deliver the billions of realtime social media activities that power our customers’ businesses every day. Gnip provides access to over 100 realtime social media data streams from dozens of social media sources, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress and more. Today, we deliver our data, ready-to-use, in the protocol of each customer’s choice. We apply data enrichments including URL expansion, language detection, Klout Scores and more to augment the raw data, making it even more valuable for our customers.

How much funding have you raised?

To date Gnip has raised a total of raised $6.6 million in funding, primarily from the Foundry Group, SoftTech VC, and First Round Captial. 

What are your success metrics? Revenue, users, downloads, etc.?

Our success metrics are based on revenue, number of customers, and number social data activities delivered through our streams. 
 
When and how did the company start?
 
Gnip was founded back in 2008 with the vision to develop innovative ways of standardizing access to high volume social media data streams.
 
I understand you are B2B, but can you explain in layman's terms why this company would be of interest to the average user?
 
Gnip’s data streams represent the stream of human consciousness, providing unfiltered insights into nearly every topic imaginable. We believe this data will change the world.  Our mission is to make this ever-expanding universe of social media data available via a consistent and reliable architecture so the world can realize the full potential of this amazing stream of information.
 
Your website says you offer data enrichment about social networking. Does this differ from "analytics," and if so, how?

Yes, Gnip delivers raw social data that features standard Data Enrichments. Data Enrichments is simply another way to describe the metadata we append to the original content to enhance the data’s utility for customers. These enrichment are designed to provide additional value to the data and help our customers that are conducting when conducting analytics and applying other applications. Our Data Enrichments include format normalization, URL expansion, deduplication, language detection, Klout Scores and more. We don’t provide analytics.  That’s what our customers do.

 

Vator News: Thanks, Chris

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