A warm welcome to folks dropping by to visit from our guest post on TechCrunch! It took more than week to calm down after hearing about the RockYou password breach to write Privacy Theater: Why Social Networks Only Pretend To Protect You.

We’d like to realize the full potential of knx.to by allowing users to merge fields that our partner APIs won’t share yet. You, the user, should be able to choose whether you trust an application like ours to create a more valuable service by including up-to-date telephone numbers, email addresses, and postal mailing addresses for your friends — and only the contact information they already chose to share with you.

We’re looking forward to your comments and feedback to post and updated and expanded version of that essay in the new year, so please don’t hesitate to tweet us at @knxto or email us directly.

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Kudos to the LinkedIn API team for shipping the long-awaited open developer platform! We’re proud that knx.to is the first shipping application using their latest OAuth-based API.

Of course, we could only ship 15 minutes after LinkedIn’s announcement because of their generous early access and technical support. Over the past two years, we’ve become one of the only development teams with experience in crawling the public Web, OpenSocial, the original LinkedIn partner API (for our Caller ID 2.0 work with BT/Ribbit), and now the new one. It’s been a long journey to puzzle out the “middleware” that allows us to work with multiple social network APIs simultaneously while preserving user’s privacy.

We’re launching our integration with the basic features that we previewed at the TechCrunch Real-Time Stream last Friday — you can watch our launch video starting 20 minutes in.

So try knx.to out for yourself right now: save time and stay on top with a real-time social “address book” that knows who you connect to.

Today we're announcing knx.to at the TechCrunch Real-Time Stream conference. Here's what we had to say at launch:

Real-time information can become a real-time distraction. “Right now” isn’t always the right time. New tweets, photos, and comments from even your closest friends and colleagues aren’t always relevant when they pop up.

What if we could deliver real-time information at the right time?

British Telecom recently purchased Ribbit, “Silicon Valley’s First Telephone Company,” in part for its vision for reinventing voice for the Web 2.0 era. Ribbit is a platform for other application developers, and this is their flagship service, Ribbit for Mobile.

It can do more than just route calls and transcribe voicemails. This is one of my messages, and Caller ID tells us the phone number and that it’s from a “Kevin Marks.” Notice that when I click to read his message, an orange ball in the corner lights up and expands to tell me more about Kevin.

This is Caller ID 2.0. This is real-time information at the right time.

Now I have the context for his call: his Tweets show that he was just in New York City yesterday. I can click to the Facebook tab, and we see a new photo of him with another friend of mine who was at the same conference.

How does this work? Ribbit isn’t blindly searching for just any Kevin Marks, or even the most famous Kevin Marks — it’s searching for my Kevin Marks, the fellow I'm connected on on several social networks.

Our startup, Ångströ, built that Caller ID 2.0 engine for Ribbit. We debuted last year as one of the TechCrunch 50 with our service for alerting you to news stories that mention colleagues and clients from your professional network. From our beta test program, we’ve learned a lot about how challenging it is to track identity across the fragmented social Web.

Today, we’re launching a new service that makes it easier to stay connected to the people who matter to you. Knx.to, or ‘connects to,’ is a new kind of search engine that can find “Everyone you know, All in one place.”

Instead of building and managing yet another centralized address book, Knx.to indexes contact information from multiple social networks. Better yet, as you can see when I start typing in my search, it’s not only faster than visiting each website to remember where I met someone; it’s not only making connections that group together the same person across several social networks; it’s also pulling in their real-time status updates.

Here’s my friend Omar Ahmad, a member of the San Carlos City Council. It’s pretty hard to find the right Omar in a Web search, but there’s only one whom I’m connected to on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, Flickr, and GMail. Now that I can see his tweets, his photography, and his updates, I can choose the right network to connect with him on.

Go to knx.to right now and you can begin taking control of your social graph. We’re proud to announce that we’re working directly with LinkedIn’s APIs and that we’re currently testing it out with them as our 6th social network partner.

Those partnerships are the key. With all of the alphabet soup of this Connect and that Connect and OpenID and OAuth and RDF and microformats, it’s possible to lose sight of the paramount goal of respecting users’ privacy — and the terms of service that enforce it.

That’s why the biggest breakthrough in making knx-to the first tool to search across so many different networks isn’t debugging those emerging technologies — it’s that we deliver this service without storing any of your private information in the cloud.

We keep all of your data in your web browser cache on your machine. Our service only tracks public profile information and encrypted links that help users network their social networks.

Walled gardens always seem popular at first, but someday soon we think people will be asking, Why can I only @ reply to another Twitter user? Why can’t I invite my Flickr friends to a Facebook forum?

We think that the same way that mapping APIs have made it downright rude to put an address on the Web without a link to a map; that an API for managing the identities we already use will enable new and exciting mashups that connect people across social networks.

So if you have an application, Web service, or publication that would benefit from delivering real-time status information about people at the right time, contact us. And if you use more than one Webmail or social network, go to knx-to and give us your feedback on how we can help you stay connected to the people who matter to you.

We’re thrilled to announce that Ribbit Mobile has launched Caller ID 2.0 with a little help from their friends at Ångströ. Ribbit is a division of the venerable British Telecom that’s been chartered to create “Silicon Valley’s first phone company” since they were acquired last year.

Using technology Ångströ developed for tapping into multiple social networks to deliver “news about your network,” Ribbit Mobile can go well beyond merely displaying +1-650-714-5529 when I call someone.

Now, they'll see my latest Tweets; photos I've taken from Flickr; photos of me on Facebook; and my current status on LinkedIn, if we're connected on each of these services.

Together, we hope this new feature helps kick off warmer, wittier, and more social conversations anytime you use Ribbit, as shown in the screenshot.

This little frog has already made a splash in the press. Check out six of the more interesting news articles and blog posts below. Again, congratulations to the whole Ribbit Mobile team!

ßetanews: For those who missed Google Voice beta, Ribbit Mobile opens in beta

“It’s like an instant background check, which Ribbit likened to a personal CRM (customer relationship management) platform. Though it seems almost intrusive, it does only grab publicly disclosed information.”

Technologizer: Ribbit Introduces a Google Voice Competitor

“It has a ‘Caller ID 2.0’ feature that integrates your address book with feeds from sources like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in order to show you stuff about the people who have called you.”

GigaOm: Ribbit Mobile’s Launch Shows BT’s Strategy Isn’t Just All Talk

“Consumers are increasingly turning to web-based services such as Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging to communicate with others.”

TMCnet: Ribbit Mobile Launches

“You can see recent updates made by your contacts to their social networks and pictures of your contacts.”

ReadWriteWeb: Ribbit Launches Google Voice Challenger

“Ribbit’s CEO Ted Griggs and co-founder Crick Waters told us yesterday, the company wants users to look at Ribbit Mobile as a “personal customer relationship management (CRM) platform.” To do so, Ribbit Mobile doesn’t just display a caller’s name and phone number. Users can also add notes to every call and [conversations can now take place within a context].”

SFGate: Ribbit offers a fuller Google Voice-like service

“Ribbit Mobile can connect to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts so you can see a friend’s status while talking, giving you a sense of what that person is up to.”

Yesterday, we had the opportunity to particpate in the 3rd installment of GigaOm's thought-provoking symposiums they dub “Bunker Sessions.” This one,“The Next Web,” started with an insight typical of Om Malik and his team: while everyone is zigging towards the “real-time” buzzword (almost for its own sake!), they're asking pointed questions about new sources of context, from geospatial to geopolitical.

The most insightful meme I took away from this conversation was from Marc Davis, former Yahoo! research scientist and current partner at Invention Arts: ”context exists beyond the data center.”

Or, to paraphrase Steve Blank’s ”inside the building, there are only opinions,” it might be more pointed to say that “data centers only house data”: a mere map of restaurants can't hold a candle to one that's remixed with your friends have eaten at, enjoyed, and may be heading to next.

Knowing that the context of the data being uploaded is from a real person, at a real place, at a real-time is what Davis got at with his “Web 4” set: Who, What, Where, and When.

In fact, this led Tom Coates to suggest a seeming paradox: “the only way to address information overload is with more information: To determine what’s most relevant, algorithms need even better knowledge of your geographical and social context.”

When the conversation turned to privacy, Joseph Smarr pointed at the difference between announcing ”I am here,” and bugging each of your friends individually to tell them. Sometimes, privacy comes from good filtering, not simply preventing the information from being shared at all (egress rather than ingress, so to speak).

The weak link in a centralized aggregation service is sharing or syndicating over its own APIs. If I report my position to Twitter, that location is stuffed into the hidden “resource fork” of a Tweet in their API. If I report that I'm attending this symposium to LinkedIn, that fact is stuck in a “roach motel,” because they have no API access to event data, as Dave McClure mentioned. Davis concurred that “large companies have not create identifiers to make this easier at scale,” along the lines of Yahoo! Placemaker WOEIDs.

Ångströ’s own Salim Ismail identified a particularly trenchant problem with social network interoperability: “Our identities are locked in walled gardens. It's impossible for me to comment about or contact someone without going through those gatekeepers. And even if I want to refer to someone I know on another social network, which of 18 different contexts do I want to refer to him as?”

Ultimately, the people in your community define what’s salient for you, because that’s the shared context that marks your membership in that community. Adam Hertz, a founder of TuneIn based their product on that insight: “We believe people are the best filter, the people you pay attention to. We pull out all the media in your (inbox), and order it by popularity within your graph and, more and more, based on how you respond to it (your engagement).”

These were only a few of the most interesting ideas that bubbled up at the event, and I can only thank the whole team again for pulling that conversation together. I can't give it any higher praise than this: it was well worth getting up early for, even on a Monday!

We've just made the big step of opening up our Beta test program to the public. Sign up now — no more waiting lists for invitations!

Behind the scenes, there have been some important steps over the summer towards making our service more scalable to support our public Beta program. We've now indexed well over 20 million stories about more than 100,000 different people and companies.

Frankly, Noteworthy News is still an expensive service to run, since we invest so much computer power to disambiguate articles. On average, we have stored about half a gigabyte of information per user and crawl the Web continuously to increase our corpus with new search results.

Of course, all of those engineering challenges will get faster, better, and cheaper over time, but investing further in scalability for its own sake would mock our main goal as a startup: finding our product/market fit. Every new user brings us more insights, and we appreciate all of your feedback.

Some of our most enthusiastic users rely on “News About Your Network” to keep in touch with their extensive network of past colleagues and customers to find new leads, new projects, and new ideas. Give our service a try and see what better intelligence about the people in your professional life can do for you... and be sure to let us know how!

Salim and I decided to launch Ångströ to find the needles in the haystacks to stay on top of the news that saturates our professional networks.

We’re serial entrepreneurs — and also investors and writers and managers. In each of those roles, we have to work our professional networks to succeed.

We need to stay on top of who’s funding what, who’s starting something new, who’s making money, and who’s not. It’s not a matter of social gossip; this sort of information is critical to making better business decisions and better professional relationships.

We needed a better way to discover and share the news we needed to know about our colleagues. That’s why we created Ångströ, to discover and share the news you need to know about the people and companies in your professional network. More »