Activity Streams

Gnip pledges allegiance to Activity Streams.

Consuming data from APIs with heterogeneous response formats is a pain. From basic format differences (XML vs JSON) to the semantics around structure and element meaning (custom XML structure, Atom, RSS), if you’re consuming data from multiple APIs, you have to handle each API’s responses differently. Gnip minimizes this pain by normalizing data from across services into Activity Streams. Activity Streams allows you to consistently digest responses from many services, using a single parsing routine in your code; no more special casing.

Gnip’s history with Activity Streams runs long and deep. We contributed to one of the first service/activity/verb mapping proposals, and have been implementing aspects of Activity Streams over the past couple of years. Over the past several months Activity Streams has gained enough traction that the decision for it to be Gnip’s canonical normalization format was only natural. We’ve flipped the switch and are proud to be part of such a useful standard.

The Activity Streams initiative is in the process of getting its JSON version together, so for now, we offer the XML version. As JSON crystalizes, we’ll offer that as well.

• Categories: Development, Industry, Technology
• Tags: activity streams, apis, atom, data normalization, format normalization, gnip, json, normalization, rss, xml
  

8 Comments

• Chris Messina said:

  June 8, 2010 at 8:34 pm

  Great news Jud! It’s been great to have Gnip’s involvement in this effort from the beginning — and to finally come full circle to the point where it’s finally meeting your business needs.

• Steve Ivy said:

  June 8, 2010 at 8:42 pm

  Jud, this is awesome! I know we had talked about this some a while back, and I’m really glad to see that the spec has come far enough to support Gnip’s core requirements. Also, ditto what Chris said.

  Keep up the good work!

• Louis Gray said:

  June 8, 2010 at 8:42 pm

  Congratulations, Gnip. This is good news indeed. Looking forward to more announced pickup of Activity Streams and seeing it become ubiquitous. Thanks for being a pioneer.

• Jud said:

  June 8, 2010 at 9:03 pm

  Thanks guys! Yea, it’s been fun to see the product requirements and spec evolution converge. Looking forward to even more here… consistent content consumption will one day rule the world !

• Julien said:

  June 8, 2010 at 10:19 pm

  Great news! It will be even simpler for you to consume the superfeedr.com data now

• Paulo McNally said:

  June 11, 2010 at 2:24 pm

  Muy bueno, esto me servirá para soap response también.

  Se saludos.