I have been watching what’s going on in web 2.0 world last time, and it’s just simple insane ! So many portals Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, etc… There are so many sites that I don’t know even where I have account and where not. But now they are going to coperate, like Twitter with Facebook, MyBlogLog which combines all platforms together. This is great idea - join all Web 2.0 stuff together, but also a big problem. Why ? Because now an application consuming user data must write-in direct support for each API for every service it requires, which usually requires a lot of development effort in terms of protocol and format support, maintenance of each API integration and other issues such as uptime and availability. Sounds terrible and it really is, fortunately now we have Gnip ! With Gnip, developers can write once for the Gnip API and gain access to user data for a number of supported publishing services.

“The goal of Gnip is to serve as a web services proxy to enable consuming services to easily access user data from a variety of sources.“.

On the publishing side Gnip supports formats such as standard RSS, Atom or XMPP.

Generally interesting thing and again we can see global trend to cooperation between services which is nice