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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.

While we've spend the last two weeks quietly working on scaling up our service — a hearty welcome to our latest batch of invitees! — it has hardly escaped notice that several other folks are scaling up as well.

Congratulations to Socialmedian, first of all, on their successful acquisition by Xing. Not only did founder Jason Goldberg pull together an amazing slate of investors, he and his team quietly, then publicly scaled their service out at an astounding pace. Even better, one key strategic reason they partnered up was to open up an application development platform at Xing, which we would love to work with to broaden the range of people Ångströ can help you stay in touch with.

Welcome, too, to Zentact. They're scaling up from an invitation-only beta to a public beta phase. Their Firefox extension watches the pages you're reading for mentions of people and their interests to prompt you to keep in touch with them.

Ångströ does something that's a bit harder to scale up: we watch the entire Web for new mentions of people you know. If there's a name mentioned in the news media, in weblogs, or on new Web pages, we grab that text and then we analyze it to see if it's actually the person you know. Our NameSense approach to estimating that relevance is based on where they work, where they went to school, and other keywords that typically appear in context with their name.

With help from our beta testers, we're finding out how to scale up to our ambitious target of delivering news that's (only) about people in your social networks... stay tuned!

Well, it's been exactly one month since we announced Ångströ at TechCrunch50. We've spent the last few weeks building out the product and making it robust enough to meet our customer service standards.

To date, we've collected over a million news stories about over ten thousand professionals. In the process, we use an immense amount of computing power -- at least by comparison to other pub/sub projects we've worked on. To migrate our setup from prototype to production, we're relying on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). We can now bring up more slaves to handle our newspaper rendering code while also gaining great snapshot-based backup and even better availability than our current colo solution. We still rely on our own tuned hardware platform for NameSense, but we've moved everything else into the cloud...

We've learned a lot from the feedback we've received from that over the past month, but most of all from our first batch of beta testers. Our first group of post-TechCrunch50 users have been busy kicking the tires and pushing the boundaries. Thanks again to all those participating - your feedback has been extremely helpful. We're busy documenting reactions from the initial users and are feeding those back into our product development cycle as quickly as possible.

We'll be opening up Ångströ to the next group of users in the coming weeks. Thanks to everyone for their enthusiasm — and patience!

Apparently, Ångströ.com isn't very pretty yet, so we need to take our plain-jane structured HTML demo and put it in a more colorful, more contemporary container...

“Donnie,” I wanted to say. “What are you talking about? Can’t you see the jaggies?”

But he couldn’t. Donald Knuth’s gray matter, far more powerful than mine, was making him look beyond the actual letters and words to the mathematical concepts that underlay them.

—Robert X. Cringely