Gnip

Gnip, Inc.
Available in English
Founded 2008
Headquarters Boulder, Colorado, USA
Area served Worldwide
Founder(s) Jud Valeski and Eric Marcoullier
Industry Social Media API Aggregation

Gnip, Inc. was a social media API aggregation company. Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, it provided data from dozens of social media websites via a single API. Calling itself the "Grand Central Station for the social web",[1] 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

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