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Gnip pushed a new platform release this week

December 12, 2008, 12:28pm by Shane Pearson

We just pushed out a new release this week that includes new publishers and capabilities. Here is a summary of the release highlights. Enjoy!

  • New YouTube publisher: Do you need an easy way to access, filter and integrate YouTube content to your web application or website? Gnip now provides a YouTube publisher so go create some new filters and start integrating YouTube based content.
  • New Flickr publisher: Our first Flickr publisher had some issues with data consistency and could almost be described as broken. We built a brand new Flickr publisher to provide better access to content from Flickr. Creating filters is a snap so go grab some Flickr content.
  • Now publisher information can be shared across accounts: When multiple developers are using Gnip to integrate web APIs and feeds it sometimes is useful to see other filters as examples. Sharing allows a user to see publisher activity and statistics, but does grant the ability to edit or delete.
  • New Data Producer Analytics Dashboard: If your company is pushing content through Gnip we understand it is important to see how, where and who is accessing the content using our platform and with this release we have added a web-based data producer analytics dashboard. This is a beta feature, not where we want it yet, and we have some incomplete data issues. However, we wanted to get something available and then iterate based on feedback. If you are a data producer let us know how to take this forward. The current version provides access to the complete list of filters created against a publisher and the information can be downloaded in XML or CSV format

Also, we have a few things we are working on for upcoming releases:

  • Gnip Polling: Our new Flickr and YouTube publishers both leverage our new Gnip Polling service, which we have started using internally for access to content that is not available via our push infrastructure. We plan to make this feature available externally to customers in the future, so stay tuned or contact us if you want to learn more.
  • User generated publishers from RSS Feeds: We are going to open up the system so anyone can create new publishers from RSS Feeds. This new feature makes it easy to access, filter and integrate tons of web based content.
  • Field level mapping on RSS feeds: A lot of times the field naming of RSS feeds across different endpoints does not map to the way the field is named in your company. This new feature will allow the editing and mapping at the individual field level to support normalization across multiple feeds.
  • Filter rule batch updates: When your filters start to get big adding lots of new rules can be a challenge. Based on direct customer feedback it will soon be possible to batch upload filter rules.

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Solution Spotlight: Strands now using Gnip

November 7, 2008, 11:54am by Shane Pearson

Strands is the newest company using the Gnip messaging platform for their web API data integration needs. Welcome Strands and thank you to Aaron for sharing what the team is doing!

Who is Strands?
Strands develops technologies to better understand people’s taste and help them discover things they like and didn’t know about. Strands has created a social recommendation engine that is able to provide real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices. This enables users to discover new things, based on their online, offline and mobile activities. The Strands.com website helps people discover new things from other people. Visit http://www.strands.com to learn more.

Real-world results Strands says they are realizing from using Gnip
Strands.com is now able to give people updates faster and more reliably. In addition, Strands has seen reduced load on their system by not having to poll for updates on sites like Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, and Digg. Gnip allows Strands to receive push data from several of these sites, and at a minimum receive notifications when a user on these sites has made an update.

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Web APIs of all shapes and sizes

October 13, 2008, 1:58pm by Shane Pearson

Not all APIs have the same capabilities and therefore they provide different levels of access to events, procedures and data. Seems obvious, but you would not think that based on the normal questions we see from people. In fact we have found that APIs can be like a lot like apples and oranges. So, with the number of available APIs growing, at a rate that can be more than 60 per month we thought people would benefit from some simple way to think of API categorization based on how they expose events and data.

We work with a large variety of APIs from a variety of service providers and have noticed that most APIs fall into a few descriptive types based on how they expose events and data. The following are the main ways we are starting to look at APIs.

  • Fire hose or “full stream”. Identi.ca and Twitter are two examples, but Flickr also has a fire hose
  • User-based stream: These services do not directly expose a full stream, but instead give people a way to assemble an aggregate stream based on a list of users. Flickr again is a good example and there are many others.
  • Activity-based Tag-based and “other”: The main way to work with these services is usually some defined activity (tag, bookmark, etc) access to information or pre-defined streams based on feeds. An example would be Delicious, which allows multiple methods to access information by APIs and feeds.

This bi-frication in API types is something people should keep in mind when they want to access a service for some specific need. If you need to get events and data for a specific need then obviously the behavior of the API is going to impact your approach. And of course here at Gnip we are hard at work trying to provide consistent approaches across all types of APIs, so back to work!

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