Social Data Provider Gnip Announces “Plugged In To Gnip” Partner Program

For companies that want to use social data from services like Twitter, Gnip is one of the “resellers” if you will. The company has been a trusted partner of Twitter, WordPress, Disqus, and most recently, Tumblr, positioning itself as the go-to marketplace for social data to be used for marketing, analytics and sentiment analysis.

Today, Gnip announced a new partner program called “Plugged In To Gnip,” which will allow partners of the service to show off the access that they have to Gnip’s firehose of social data.

Plugged_In_To_Gnip_Large copyAmong the launch partners are IBM, Union Metrics and Waggener Edstrom. These are all companies that are using the data to better serve their clients for a variety of reasons. Companies who are interested in this program have to be accepted, giving them a bit of a “seal of approval” via Gnip that they’re using the data for good, not evil, it seems.

They also get early access to features and new opportunities to grow out their own offering.

Here’s what COO of Gnip, Chris Moody, had to say about the program:

The social data ecosystem is maturing from the days when companies would scrape together disparate fragments of social data to power their solutions. By creating the Plugged In To Gnip program, we’re recognizing and proactively collaborating with clients and partners who are building their solutions on comprehensive, reliable and sustainable social data.

For a company like Twitter, letting Gnip decide who gets what, and for what cost, is the strategy that they’ve chosen. Most recently, PeopleBrowsr decided to take Twitter to court over a deal it had in place, which Twitter says it rightly voided. Gnip is one of two re-sellers of Twitter’s firehose that PeopleBrowsr can now work with; however, its CEO has no interest in doing so.

Things are changing in “big social data,” and Gnip is making it easier on networks to provide its data in a clear, concise and affordable way. The company calls itself the “Social Media API,” and that’s not a bad space to own.

[Photo credit: Flickr]