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Twitter Acquires Gnip

blog.gnip.com

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Re: Twitter Acquires Gnip

#11

Post by thefreeman »

waterside81 wrote: post #8
AznHisoka wrote: post #6

So Twitter basically acquired their own data? Hmm.. more proof I dun know how Silicon Valley works.

I'm a customer of Gnip's - they provider several enrichments and data normalizations on top of Twitter's stream. Could Twitter have hired X engineers and duplicated what Gnip does? Perhaps - but Gnip also has an existing customer base, existing revenue flow, infrastructure setup to handle customers creating their own matching rules etc. There's more to Gnip than just re-selling the Twitter firehose.

Gnip also integrates with a number of other services as well

Re: Twitter Acquires Gnip

#12

Post by techpeace »

mynameisasdf wrote: post #5
willu wrote: post #2

Interesting, I had gotten the impression Twitter was aligning itself more with DataSift in recent years. I used Gnip a few years ago and thought it was a great service, although the high price point drove us to ultimately roll our own.

By "roll our own" do you mean you just used the twitter streaming API? Did that have enough data?

I had the same question when I read this. The streaming API is only a fraction of the data offered by the firehose, but that's not as much of a problem in every use case.

Re: Twitter Acquires Gnip

#13

Post by willu »

mynameisasdf wrote: post #5
willu wrote: post #2

Interesting, I had gotten the impression Twitter was aligning itself more with DataSift in recent years. I used Gnip a few years ago and thought it was a great service, although the high price point drove us to ultimately roll our own.

By "roll our own" do you mean you just used the twitter streaming API? Did that have enough data?

Yes, Twitter streaming API plus several other data sources (Facebook, Reddit, forums, etc.). It's enough for us since we're always filtering by keywords or users. We were also granted elevated access.

Re: Twitter Acquires Gnip

#14

Post by fvryan »

thefreeman wrote: post #11
waterside81 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a customer of Gnip's - they provider several enrichments and data normalizations on top of Twitter's stream. Could Twitter have hired X engineers and duplicated what Gnip does? Perhaps - but Gnip also has an existing customer base, existing revenue flow, infrastructure setup to handle customers creating their own matching rules etc. There's more to Gnip than just re-selling the Twitter firehose.

Gnip also integrates with a number of other services as well

Will these sites want Twitter to have firehose access to their data? For example Tumblr, Foursquare, Wordpress? They also offer Facebook data, but it is a managed public API connection.

Re: Twitter Acquires Gnip

#15

Post by thefreeman »

fvryan wrote: post #14
thefreeman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnip also integrates with a number of other services as well

Will these sites want Twitter to have firehose access to their data? For example Tumblr, Foursquare, Wordpress? They also offer Facebook data, but it is a managed public API connection.

It's a very good question. I really have no idea what the implications are and probably depend on each company.

Re: Twitter Acquires Gnip

#16

Post by brianbreslin »

pincubator wrote: post #10

I guess that makes Twitter data cheaper than before? Last time when I contacted them for one week of worth tweets (with some filters on top) they wanted me to pay tens of thousands dollars. I ended up crawling the data myself.

were you able to get firehose access for that? or were you just spidering the public tweet stream?

Re: Twitter Acquires Gnip

#18

Post by PanMan »

Interesting: It seems twitter now does see distributing their data as a valid businessmodel (before they 'outsourced' this to DataSift and Gnip). Wonder what it will mean for the other sources Gnip has, and for the customers of Datasift.

Re: Twitter Acquires Gnip

#19

Post by nathancahill »

willu wrote: post #13
mynameisasdf wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "roll our own" do you mean you just used the twitter streaming API? Did that have enough data?

Yes, Twitter streaming API plus several other data sources (Facebook, Reddit, forums, etc.). It's enough for us since we're always filtering by keywords or users. We were also granted elevated access.

What was the process like for elevated access? I'm deciding between using Gnip or Twitter's streaming API today actually.

Re: Twitter Acquires Gnip

#20

Post by mbesto »

AznHisoka wrote: post #6

So Twitter basically acquired their own data? Hmm.. more proof I dun know how Silicon Valley works.

I'll try to simplify it as much as possible.

Capital is raised by companies to accelerate growth. Growth acceleration can manifest itself in many ways. Specifically, in this case, as you rightfully point out, Twitter could easily build this service themselves. They also, at the time of Gnip's inception weren't totally sure there was a business model here.* So they let another organization take that risk for them, instead of using their own capital. They end up paying more capital in the long run but the risk is reduced.

*I recognize that most likely the certainty of Gnip's business model is (1) much higher due to the "duh, of course people want this" nature of their business and (2) that the people investing here are all "in this together". It, however, doesn't negate the fact that there is indeed risk.

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