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Friday, July 18, 2008

Twitter gives it's full feed to Gnip.

In a techcrunch post Michael Arrington breaks the news that Gnip now gets the full Twitter PubSub Feed and all developers can access it via Gnip's API.

Twitter's top managers stated earlier that they are worried about if it's safe to give away the full feed and in the Twitter Development Talk group they Alex mentioned that if the XMPP feed would be given to anybody it would require an additional contract that would prohibit resyndicatíon of this content. Currently only a few sites were given access to to this feed including FriendFeed that is actually building a competitor to Twitter on top of this feed.

I really think it's a great move as Twitter actually keeps the control over the feed as it can still cut any site from using it and it can cut Gnip in case it wouldn't be able to block the sites that abuse the feed usage.

For all the developers it's simply great, because that would allow us to provide updates to users in real time handling all the communication with the end-user from own servers without pushing the API calls to their limits. The Twitter API would serve to get the additional protected information.

I still didn't see a company that did the work with 3d party developers right. Google's i-home is a tutorial on how the work with developers shouldn't be done, Facebook lets crappy apps win the popularity race without supporting the apps that create user value and Twitter is navigating the waters that has high storm risk. And I really think Twitter should help some small apps and bots get some popularity advertising them inside Twitter. I know some absoultelly great Twitter aps that will never get very popular, but are really valuable and need some help in promotion.

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