DISQUS

For anyone seeking public twitter data, then Gnip can help tremendously by sending notifications when there is new data to be grabbed. This keeps you from wasting polls on endpoints that have not changed.

We've got some major improvements coming out in the next couple of weeks, as well, but we're already in a position to help out a lot of application developers as is.

Eric Marcoullier
CEO
Gnip (www.gnipcentral.com)

The "real-time" web is certainly a driving factor for this, but painting it expressly in terms of consumer aggregation apps leads people down all sorts of unhelpful rabbit holes.

The real issue here is about machine-to-machine transfer of personal data so that you can enable services B - Z can all take advantage of the data you or your contacts have given service A.

While the social sites have been the first to present use cases for real-time data distribution, it's e-commerce and information services who will create widespread consumer value out of shared data. Once data is truly in the cloud, everyone (with proper authentication, of course) will be able to leverage the intention data that you create across various services.

Frankly, all the social media stuff can be a bit overwhelming. What I'm really looking for is smarter applications that understand me better and that starts by putting my data in the cloud. Otherwise, it's just the search engines and primary social networks fighting out who controls your data and let's you have access to it from time to time (an under their strict terms of use).

Nick, thanks for the writeup. We're comfortably staying behind the scenes and hopefully helping other people make great services upon aggregate data.

I hear your pain on the communication front. You might want to look at Fuser, who will be integrating Gnip shortly. They are creating a communication dashboard that unifies all those sources.