Twitter + Grip = Information Wants to be PAID

Twitter announced today a new partnership with social data streaming service Gnip at the Defrag Conference outside of Denver: Gnip will offer 50% of all the messages posted to Twitter for $360,000 per year, or 5% of all messages for $60,000 per year. Pricing is not yet on the Gnip site, but was disclosed in an interview with ReadWriteWeb.

Boulder-based Gnip (the name is “ping” spelled backwards) is a middleman between social media sites and social media monitoring companies. The company has raised about $5 million from Foundry Group, SoftTech VC and First Round Capital. Customers include Alterian, Next Big Sound and Attensity.

Ryan Sarver, a member of Twitter's platform team, said that the move is aimed at helping people who are analyzing huge bodies of Twitter posts in order to perform sentiment analysis, identify trends, and other sorts of data-intensive tasks. "We haven't been able to serve that market well in the past," Sarver said.