NEWS: Gnip Launches To Ease The Strain On Web Services

Gnip Launches To Ease The Strain On Web Services

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier sold his company to Yahoo in January 2007 for an estimated $10 million. He left Yahoo in July 2007 with the seed of a new idea germinating in his head - “Make data portability suck less.”

The result of that thinking is Gnip, a new service we first mentioned in March 2008 when they announced seed funding.

Today the details are being revealed and the service is launching. Gnip isn’t a consumer service. Rather, it’s designed to sit in between social networks and other web services that produce a lot of user content and data (like Digg, Delicious, Flickr, etc.) and data consumers (like Plaxo, SocialThing, MyBlogLog, etc.) with the express goal of reducing API load and making the services more efficient.

A close analogy is a blog ping server (see our overview here). Ping servers tell blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search when a blog has been updated, so the search engines don’t have to constantly re-index sites just to see if new content has been posted. Instead, the blog tells the ping server when it updates, which tells the search engines to drop by and re-index. The creation of the first ping server, Weblogs.com, by Dave Winer resulted in orders of magnitude better efficiency for blog search engines...