Gnip – unifying the internet’s underbelly?

Via a news post from twitter I came across Gnip (http://gnip.com), a fairly new service with the aim of “Making data portability suck less”.

A vast number of commercial and social services on the web rely on passing data around via web services and though the best way to do it, the number of different API’s, and different implementations of the same technology can cause all sorts of unexpected headaches.

Though it’s not available mainstream yet it seems that Gnip, amongst it’s other services, is looking to offer a unified API for common web services