Gnip has found itself a sweet spot in partnering with startups who make data available via APIs. The company currently has access to Twitter and Tumblr’s firehoses, and has announced today that it will be making the publicly available data of Reddit, Instagram, bitly, Stack Overflow, Panoramio and Plurk available to its customers who rely on Gnip to do social reporting. Additionally, existing YouTube and Flickr data gets enhanced geo support.

Last November, we reported that Gnip serves up over 100B social activities per month to its customers, allowing them to track keywords, mentions and trends as it pertains to their companies and social campaigns. Its partner program is an extremely attractive offering to PR and marketing firms that need to show the proof of their work to their clients.

Gnip’s COO, Chris Moody, explained that each new source of data that Gnip provides gives its customers more insight into their own business: “Our customers care about conversations happening across the entire spectrum of social sources.”

Its “Enterprise Data Collector” pulls in all of the data from these public APIs, performs deduplication and does URL analysis after formatting them properly, even if they’re shortened.

Here’s what Gnip had to say on their blog about the new data sources and why their tools are important to companies:

A significant part of what Gnip does is make social data easier to digest by optimizing the polling of these APIs and by enriching and normalizing the data. We also normalize the data, so if you’re digesting social data from Gnip from the public API of Instagram, it will arrive appear in the same normalized format as social data from Twitter.

Reddit is an interesting usecase here, as people are going to the site more and more to complain about certain companies and products. A conversation can quickly get out of control before a company even sees what’s going on, waiting for it to bubble up to one unlucky support person. Getting those brand mentions quickly can help a business participate in a conversation before it goes south.

For Instagram, people are taking pictures of anything and everything, and attaching locations to them. For example, if McDonald’s wanted to track all of the photos posted from their stores, it would be a pretty impossible thing to do without the collections and reporting capabilities of a company like Gnip. These companies can’t build out the resources fast enough to create their own in-house monitoring solutions, nor do they have the access to all of the firehoses that Gnip does.

Having said all of that, I would love to know how many servers Gnip has hosting all of this stuff.

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