Gnip Pings the Social Web

One of the biggest problems with all these new social status and social content services is the delay in viewing the content via aggregators. Even Facebook’s newsfeed has its own delay. Today, Gnip, a company created by Eric Marcoullier, ex-co-founder of MyBlogLog, has officially announced their new service. For those of you that are looking to instantly speed up your social news alerts, there’s no need to sign up.

Gnip is completely limited to data producer services and data consumer services. In other words, the end consumer never gets to see GNIP in action. Instead, all this means is that when you view your newsfeed via MyBlogLog or other participating data consumer services, you will have quicker access to the activities your friends are engaged in across the web.

This service is ultimately a data interchange for the social web. Marshall Kirkpatrick has pointed out a few services that the company plan on launching in the next 90 days. According to Marshall, Gnip will provide a protocol switching service that translates things like XMPP/Jabber to RSS. This way various services can be interoperable even if they don’t speak the same language.

Additionally, Gnip will provide profile discovery services to help interlink user identities across the social web. I think this service sounds pretty sweet but it still doesn’t help me manage one of the largest problem I have on the social web: reading messages from multiple services. Currently I receive Facebook messages, wall posts and mini-feed comments as well as FriendFeed comments, Twitter and Plurk replies and direct messages from users.

It has become increasingly challenging for me to manage all my incoming messages since I don’t have a centralized location. Gnip doesn’t solve this problem though, it simply helps provide quicker message distribution. Someone else is going to need to deal with incoming message aggregation.