Givvy Blog

Sometimes I read about a site or piece of software and have one of these “Why didn’t I think of that?” moments.  Gnip is the most recent example.  This has little to do directly with the nonprofit world and giving, but it’s still cool.  What Gnip does is become a central service for receiving and distributing updates from data-feed sites such as Digg, flickr, etc.   The purpose is for publishers of this data to have fewer people asking for the same stuff over and over, and for consumers of the data to be proactively notified (pinged - gnip = ping backwards) instead of having to constantly poll the publishers’ sites.

I saw this on Brad Feld’s “Feld Thoughts” blog (a good blod to read, btw).  Brad’s a partner in the Foundry Group, a VC firm out of Boulder, CO.  He points to a really great article from Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital about Francis Bates, the inventor of the modern mailbox (the flag was his innovation).  The similarity between Gnip and Bates’ mailbox flag is that both innovations cut down on unnecessary traffic - the flag on the mailbox meant the mail carrier didn’t have to stop at every address to check for outgoing mail.  It also meant you could stay inside on rainy days and only go to the mailbox to retrieve your mail once the mailman put up the flag (funny, they don’t do this anymore, do they?).

Best of luck to the Gnip team!