Ping, ping, ping! That's the sound made day and night by the new social media technologies rapidly proliferating around the web... and the machines are getting tired. Polling for updates to user data streams, wishing they spoke the same language and dreaming they knew which accounts belonged to the same people across different services.

Sounds like a great opportunity for an infrastructure provider, doesn't it? Enter the sexiest infrastructure provider we've seen in a long time: Gnip. Venture funded and built by exited MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier, Gnip wants to serve as the grand central station and universal translation service for the new social web.

The primary service that Gnip offers at launch today is to capture user data updates from any web application and then serve up the very latest information to anyone else who requests it. Your application doesn't have to ping Flickr, YouTube, etc. etc. every few minutes and ask "have any of our users done anything on your individual service?" Now with Gnip, Flickr (a launch par