It’s said that the difference between data and information comes down to a matter of usability. Not every company has the means to plod through an unlimited firehose of data in order to glean the information that will help it to move forward. For customers of Boulder-based Gnip, that problem gets easier today. The company is releasing a feature called PowerTrack for Automattic (WordPress.org, .com and IntenseDebate) that will allow Gnip’s customers to filter out only the data that’s valuable to them.
In January of 2012 Gnip became the official partner to Automattic, providing social data from over 60 million blogs that live within the WordPress network. On top of that, Gnip can pull in social signals such as likes and shares from not only the blogs but also their comments sections. Firehose is, in this case, perhaps an understatement.
Gnip Marketing Manager Elaine Ellis explains things a bit further:
“We’ve seen increasing demand for the product, but not everyone is able to ingest the entire firehose…Now instead of handling three separate firehoses, they can filter data from one firehose. Also, if a brand is only interested in only a certain WordPress site, they can track the activity around a certain blog.”
What’s perhaps most interesting about the move from Gnip is that it’s a signal of supply and demand. Companies are finding huge value in social data, but they’re looking for more granular content than what they’d perhaps find on Facebook and Twitter. With Automattic’s products, they’re able to get the data that they need, while still paying attention to signals that run parallel across numerous services.
Gnip provides social data from a number of sources, including Disqus, Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Instagram and many more. The company marked its place in the social data sphere by being the first provider of the full, historical firehose from Twitter in September of 2012.
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