Gnip

Gnip, Inc. was a social media API aggregation company. Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, it provided data from dozens of social media websites via a single API. Calling itself the "Grand Central Station for the social web", Gnip was among the first social media API aggregation services.

Gnip is known as an early influencer in building the real-time web. The company has also been instrumental in defining relevant web standards: Gnip's co-founder Eric Marcoullier actively advocated for adoption of open web standards, and helped define the new Activity Streams format for web data.

Subsequent to a 2010 data licensing agreement with Twitter Inc, Twitter purchased Gnip in April 2014.

History

Gnip was founded by Jud Valeski and Eric Marcoullier with an initial investment of $1 million. The company was based on the premise that collecting data from many social APIs simultaneously is tedious and time-consuming. It dubbed itself the "Grand Central Station for the Social Web" shortly after launch. Although the company launched with just a few basic features such as notifications, the product was designed to act as an intermediary to simplify the collection of social media data. The company used the tagline "making data portability suck less."