How do I use Gnip?

   1. Setup an account.
   2. Read the API documentation.
   3. Incorporate Gnip into your system. We have a variety of convenience libraries to suit your daily programming needs.

Doesn't XMPP already do this?
Yes. However, XMPP isn't widely adopted enough to have solved the bigger picture problem.

Does Gnip guarantee message delivery? 

Our product lives or dies based on whether or not we get the messages you want, to you, so we do our best to make sure that always happens. We have a clustered, load-balanced, system with replicated nodes and various failovers.

What's Gnip's latency like?
Our goal is to ensure you have access to messages within 60 seconds of them being available to Gnip itself. Usually it's much faster than that, but we need to leave ourselves some slack. There are times when Publisher's don't give us data within that 60 second window, and data comes into Gnip late; we push it through our system as soon as it comes in.

What about identity, authentication, credential management, oAuth, openID?
Gnip currently only plays in the public playground. Gnip only works with public activities that do not require usernames and passwords. Gnip does not come in contact with login/auth credentials of any kind. We aspire to support private activities, but there is enough of a problem to solve with public data, that we're starting there first. We hope oAuth and openID get enough penetration, and machine-to-machine support, that they solve most of the private data problem for us.

Shouldn't this be federated?
Yes. We, as a community, will get there.