

Twitter Acquires Gnip - noinput
http://blog.gnip.com/

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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.

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thevaibhav
I've often wondered if there's any hidden terminology in some of these press
release, eg: "[http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/15/twitter-buys-gnip-
taking-o...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/15/twitter-buys-gnip-taking-
ownership-of-the-top-source-of-twitter-data/")

"To that end, we have agreed to acquire Gnip" \- I'm wondering for example if
the "agreed to acquire Gnip" means that Twitter doesn't see this as a high-
value acquisition on the same level as Crashlytics or Mopub.

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nacs
I found that phrasing weird in the blog as well: "Today I’m pleased to
announce that Twitter has agreed to acquire Gnip".

Makes it sound like they almost forced the acquisition on Twitter.

I'm not sure that Gnip is a 'high value acquisition' for Twitter though -
AFAIK they're basically just re-streaming Twitter fire hose data which Twitter
could do themselves. This is probably just a way for Twitter to lock down/get
even more control over their ecosystem.

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spullara
The wording is generally used because the transaction has been agreed t though
it may not have been completed officially / legally.

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pincubator
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.

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

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toomuchtodo
Most likely spidering; its difficult/expensive to get firehose access.

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dalek2point3
does this mean that they will no longer sell non-twitter data like Foursquare?

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elwell
I wonder what this will mean for Gnip's biggest competitor, DataSift.

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elwell
[http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/datasift-there-is-no-
change...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/datasift-there-is-no-change-to-
our-relationship-with-twitter-after-gnip-acquisition/)

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Xorlev
Best of luck to the Gnip guys -- they're a great group of people.

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joeblau
Congrats to those guys. I worked with their service for about a year and they
had a great product.

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willu
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.

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

~~~
willu
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.

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

~~~
willu
It was pretty straightforward in our case. We had to show them that we had use
cases that weren't feasible with the default access level and also demonstrate
that we weren't competing with their user experience at all. Not sure how much
it mattered but we had been using their streaming API for almost as long as it
existed.

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pauldunstone
Not surprising to see Twitter finally acquire Gnip after working with them for
four years. A great achievement for the team at Gnip, and will be interesting
to watch the data model they intend on developing with Gnip as time goes on.

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mark_l_watson
Sorry, off topic, but:

Question: is Twitter's free "garden hose" sampled data stream still available?

I used to use the small garden hose sample of near real time tweets. I just
tried running an old script to fetch the garden hose and it didn't work.

On topic: I thought that the Gnip business model was interesting, and I can't
help but think that the other data sources that Gnip processes and resells may
not like this aquisition.

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Ianvdl
Yes it is.

The API changed and now requires authentication, so that might be why your
script wasn't working.

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dfgonzalez
Are you sure the Garden Hose has free access? I can't find any public access
to it in the docs, everything directs me to their "data partners", which
charge for this information.

~~~
Ianvdl
I'm assuming you and the OP are referring to the Streaming API? More info
here:
[https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/streaming](https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/streaming)

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Avishai_Bitton
Mazal Tov, but this isn't the game changer I was hopping for (:

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MCarusi
Congrats!

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

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waterside81
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.

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thefreeman
Gnip also integrates with a number of other services as well

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fvryan
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.

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

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pavel_lishin
Either Ghostery or AdBlock prevent the actual content of the blog post from
loading. Please don't rely on Javascript to load content like that.

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jstalin
Not sure why you're being downvoted but I logged in to same the same thing.
This blog is blank to me.

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robryan
He is being downvoted because it is crazy to expect websites to work around
the bugs in various 3rd party plugins. This is an issue for the plugins to
fix.

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pavel_lishin
I would argue that relying on Javascript to display what ought to be a simple
static site is the problem here, but I also agree that perhaps the plugins
ought to recognize what's going on and allow that JS to run.

