I recently wrote about how well things are going at Gnip. Here we are just a few weeks later and my friends at Gnip continue to generate goodness in several different directions.
Today Gnip announced it has partnered with Twitter and the U.S. Library of Congress to manage the receipt of all historical data from Twitter and facilitate its delivery to the Library of Congress. This news builds off a release from the Library of Congress back in April where LoC announced that they will digitally archive every public tweet from Twitter’s inception and will continue to archive new tweets going forward. LoC has hinted that the archive will have an “emphasis on scholarly and research” endeavors.
Delivering a bunch of 140 character tweets might not seem like a big deal, but when you consider that Twitter is currently pumping out data at a rate of 35Mbps (and growing) with a max recorded rate of roughly 6000 tweets per second, the challenges of managing this transfer become substantial. Gnip is currently delivering over a half billion social activities per day to almost all the top social media monitoring firms. Since Gnip was Twitter’s first authorized data reseller it isn’t too surprising that they partnered with Twitter and the Library of Congress for this important endeavor. The best part of this deal is that some of the key technical bits that were required to make this project a reality will almost certainly end up in Gnip’s future business offerings so the commercial Twitter ecosphere will likely benefit from this effort at some point too.
Just yesterday, Gnip announced that Chris Moody joined the company as President & COO. I’ve been good friends with Chris for the last several years and am super excited to be working closely with him. I anticipate that Chris and Jud Valeski, Gnip’s CEO, will make a powerful duo.
On Monday, the company announced a much anticipated product improvement that allows existing customers to open multiple connections to Premium Twitter Feeds on their Gnip data collectors. The best part is that customers won’t be charged the standard Twitter licensing fee for the same tweet delivered across multiple connections. Instead, Gnip offers a small flat fee per month for each additional connection. This is a big win for ops managers who have multiple environments to manage for their various release cycles and for large enterprises with systems distributed across data centers all over the world.
For those keeping track, that’s three big announcement in three days. Chris also pointed out on Gnip’s blog yesterday that several other key individuals have joined the company in the last week including Bill Adkins, Seth McGuire, Charles Ince, and Brad Bokal.
Guys – keep on Doing More Faster!