Ma.gnolia Blog: We Got Gnip!
A heads up for readers: this post is on the technical side, and will be of interest to anyone doing web developement, or who might otherwise be curious about how the evolution of the programmable web.
When the futuristic world of the year 2000 finally arrived, websites barely knew how to talk to each other beyond linking between pages. APIs were looked on with suspicion by many business managers and marketing departments, while those who saw the true potential had little in the way of standards for writing app to app functionality.
Fast forward to the current day, and we now have the opposite problem: there are numerous compelling and well-architected standards to use when serving up and consuming data. Different service providers make their chocies according to theirs and their customer’s needs. They do the same with decisions on API usage rules, and how to authenticate usage at the API level.
Sound a bit tangled? It is, and smart people have been working on a way to make it better. Today, we’re unveiling our integration with Gnip, and these words from their website sum up their solution to that current-day tangle:
None of these issues are insurmountable, most are not even complicated. They’re hassles. An exponentially growing set of hassles that distract you from the features of your service that your users actually care about. Gnip is here to help. We make it easy to aggregate user data so that you can focus on doing something cool with it.
Gnip’s de-hassling technology will let developers poll Ma.gnolia for new public bookmarks through the “ma.gnolia” Gnip provider, without concern for protocols or the latency between update requests. There’s a benefit to the Ma.gnolia community, as well, because we’ll be handling less API traffic even as the number of applications that work with Ma.gnolia, not to mention the member base, continues to grow. Talk about win-win!
A much more in-depth write-up of Gnip’s recent launch and their exciting roadmap for the near future can be found at ReadWriteWeb, and if you want to get your hands dirty right away, the Gnip API docs are just a click away.
Posted by Todd on July 9, 2008 | Mark This Post
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