Gnip announced yesterday that they now have access to the Twitter XMPP feed and will be making it available to everybody through them.
The idea behind Gnip is to basically become a middle man between a service and another service, grabbing data from multiple services and then making it available to many other services.
Essentially what this means is that anyone will be able to grab the XMPP feed (which means, all of the content on Twitter gets pushed to you) from Gnip and will dramatically reduce the load on Twitter. If Twitter only has to push to one service (Gnip) then they don’t have to worry about pushing to others.
This is an incredibly important move by Twitter meaning that it will be even easier for users to get access to Twitter the way they want to and where they want to.
Now what needs to happen is someone needs to build an IM-like client for Twitter that uses XMPP to access data in real time, no more API limits with Twhirl and no more getting 6 new messages every 5 minutes from it, now the updates will be pushed to you in real time.
I love Twitter and know that many of you out there also love Twitter, this is the next big step towards bettering the service and allowing Twitter to spend more time on what really matters, improving the service in terms of features, reliability, and ubiquity.