The Real McCrea

Great news today, as reported on TechCrunch by Michael Arrington, with Twitter sharing the data love with recently launched Gnip. Until now, there had been a lot of speculation about whether Twitter might be choosing a less open path, so this is not only great news in the narrow (for Gnip and its consumer sites, like Plaxo), but as a probable sign of Twitter’s strategy going forward, this is huge.

For those who haven’t followed this closely, Gnip is a new service that is helping with a key scalability challenge at the core of the emerging Social Web. In a world in which many different services are aggregating data feeds, the burden is rising rapidly on sites like Twitter, who must respond to ever more “Do you have any updates?” requests. Gnip flips the model, and pushes updates to those aggregators, offloading the burden from Twitter, Flickr, and many more to come.

We discussed Gnip in detail on Episode 1 of The Social Web TV, “Time to Get Pushy“. If you want to learn more, check it out.

I also recommend Dave Winer’s piece on this. He’s a key voice in this conversation. And props to Nic Cubrilovic of TechCrunchIT, who along with Steve Gillmor, has been vocally pushing for Twitter to take this move.

And for more background on why Gnip is Gnip, I did a post recently on the origin of their name.