Gnip is an interesting company. It might not be extremely sexy or one that gets a lot of attention in mainstream press, let alone tech blogs. But it’s one that provides data from social services for a cost. For example, Gnip is a partner with Twitter in sharing its firehose of data for customers who want to know what people are saying about their brand or company.
Other partnerships have come Gnip’s way, like the one with Tumblr. The way it started out was just like it did with Twitter, a firehose. But Tumblr has more structured data than Twitter does, as it’s more of a network of blogs. Today, Gnip announced that it is now providing the data in a more structured way for companies that want to find out what’s hot and fresh, as well as the sentiment about their brand in real-time.
Gnip has partners that take this structured data and place it into a nice little dashboard that can be accessed by these folks. I spoke to Gnip COO Chris Moody about what this partnership means for its legions of customers, 90 percent of which are Fortune 500 companies:
I think Tumblr is one of the most exciting sources of social data that is just now being tapped and its value is just now being realized. The level of interest and amount of adoption of the data is really exciting.
We talked a bit about why Gnip was going to the next level with its Tumblr partnership and it’s quite simple, Moody states: “When we originally launched a product earlier this year we went after the biggest immediate need from Tumblr data, which was effectively a firehose, and that’s great. There’s people doing advance analytics and are easiest served with a full firehose. The reality is that the volume that Tumblr is producing in the tens of millions of posts a day, that’s incredibly hard to just ingest and make sense of.”
It’s the customers that really make Gnip go. They are hungry for more data, and they’re turning to Moody’s company for it. Being able to filter through this massive firehose easier makes life better for everyone involved:
At its core, our filtering lets you filter real-time content on a variety of levels. Let me know when Coke is mentioned. But it goes far beyond keywords. You can track URLS, track activity on certain Tumblrs.
Whether a company wants to track mentions of their brands, a specific URL or just get information about the latest trend-du-jour, Tumblr’s data can provide a ridiculous amount of insight. There are others doing this type of work, but Moody clearly believes that Gnip is in the driver’s seat and is dedicated to providing its customers with the best experience possible:
We’re the dominant market leader in the enterprise space. When you own the market, you are naturally invested to focus on what your customers are asking for. We don’t spend a lot of time dreaming up things. We spend time asking questions. We knew there was huge demand for Tumblr data, and the firehose was the fastest way to do this. Does it meet their needs? Do they have more needs? Yes. This is great, but we needed something more accessible.
On serving up over 100 billion activities per month, up from 30 billion this time last year, to customers, Moody had this to say: “These numbers are staggering. Numbers recently published by others in our space are a fraction of our numbers. This is our fifth year, and we’re just getting started…”
Game, Set, Match. It’s all about data these days, and Gnip is on it.
[Photo credit: Flickr]
Comment