Gnip launched v2.0 yesterday with some enhancements and a pricing model. The pricing model is based on chargeback model as I speculated when I first wrote about them here. For those of you who don’t know about Gnip, Gnip notifies changes to the data that you are interested in, on an endpoint you specify.  All the changes can be notified in real time. The source of such data is typically called “Sender/Producer” in the messaging world and the data who consumes it is called a “Subscriber or Consumer”. Some examples from Gnip’s world include producers such as Twitter, Delicious, Digg, and consumers such as Lijit, Plaxo, Twitterrush, etc.

Summarizing the enhancements released in Gnip v2.0 is:

1. Introduction of Filters for capturing data, based on complex rules. The Filter introduction deprecates Collections from their earlier version.

2. Introducing XMPP support for outbound messaging. However per a posting on their blog, this is not a full blown publish-subscribe (pub-sub) model.

3. Earlier Gnip supported polling in order to retrieve a change to the data of interest. However now polling has been deprecated and it seems they have implemented a pure publish subscribe messaging model for notifying changes to the data of interest to consumers (subscribers). Pub-Sub models are architecturally favored over polling. For Gnip’s consumers, this means that they save on network bandwidth. This is a nice tangible value add.

4. Consumers/Subscribers can get complete access to data streams from the producers, such as Digg, Twitter, Six Apart and Delicious subject to their licensing terms without any direct interaction with those sites. Gnip seemed to have done this by sharing revenue with the producers.

5. Gnip introduces two flavors to their service: standard (commercial) and community editions. The community edition is free for non commercial use or up to 10,000 rules per publisher on outbound messaging. The commercial edition comes with all the features of that of standard edition and in addition charges $100 per publisher per month on outbound messaging with a maximum of $1000/- per month. More details are available over here.

The pricing model clearly shows that Gnip is trying to position itself as a value provider which would eventually maintain a service catalog, rather than, maintaining SLA’s on the services provided.