Almost four years ago I set out to solve a deceptively simple problem: 95% of the Google Alerts I received about the entrepreneur Adam Rifkin were about the Hollywood movie director instead.

I worked with Salim Ismail, another “pub/sub” pioneer with a disturbing doppelgänger to co-found Ångströ and unlock the power of your social graph.

With the help of investors like CommerceNet and advisors such as Avery Lyford, our team shipped apps to discover hot new photos on Facebook, improve Caller ID by using LinkedIn profiles, adding style and links to Twitter, create a real-time social address book, and a slew of other services (some of which are open source).

On the warm summer evening of August 20th in West Hollywood on the world-famous Sunset Strip, however, our original quest to disambiguate Rifkins came to a head. As anyone can tell from our incontrovertible photographic evidence, Ångströ is clearly separating the director of LOOK from the director of 106 Miles!

Salim and I would like to thank everyone who was part of the adventure — not least, the thousands of users and beta testers who helped define our products and inspired our whole team.

While our work here may be done, the struggle for open, interoperable social networks is still only just beginning, and I'm looking forward to working on that in my new role at Google.

I had arrived at Twitter HQ with a proposal for “@anyone”: bringing the ability to @reply or @mention anyone you know, on any social network. Without annotations, there’s no elegant way to refer to a colleague on LinkedIn or a friend on Facebook without embedding a long link to their profile, or an even more obscure URL shortener. Who wants to read “@t and I are so proud of “scaring” #tanhf judges http://www.crunchbase.com/person/ron-conway & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_%28computer_programmer%29 !!”?

Read more at our guest post on ReadWriteWeb... or go straight to the demo page!

DiscoExplorer

We announced the first open source release of Disco Explorer in a guest post on TechCrunch titled “Facebook’s Disconnect: Open Doors, Closed Exits.”

Disco Explorer is a tool to explore the data that users have uploaded to Facebook over the years. It’s a new type of instant, private search engine for your social life, like KNX.to, our real-time, social address book.

It only indexes a few types of information from Facebook so far, but if you’ve been trying to find a status update from last month or a link you shared last year, take it for a spin and voice your opinion on what it should do next!

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We’re glad to announce that Knx.to “connects to” MySpace! You can now add up to 400 of your top friends from MySpace to your own real-time social address book. By indexing their profiles along with all of your other contacts from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Google Mail, and Yahoo! Mail, you can pull together a complete picture of your connections’ photos, statuses, and other activities before you call, write, or text them.

We used the MySpaceID JavaScript Library (JSL), one of the MySpace Platform’s newest tools, to protect the privacy of this information by delivering it directly to your browser. For anyone who wants to take it for a spin, head on over to http://knx.to/ — but if you’re a developer who’d like to learn a few of the more arcane tips and tricks to getting this working, read on… More »

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.

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!

It’s been fascinating to walk around the Fox Theater this morning and see the level of excitement around “real-time” — even if much of it is “what does ‘real-time’ even mean?” and “there’s got to be a better name for this stuff!” Though, I was tickled by Ron Conway’s suggestion of “the Now Web,” since it’s ironic to me that KnowNow shut down just about a year ago… More »

One of the better descriptions of Twitter I’ve read on their blog likens it to “your own personal wire service.”. So what if we took that concept and ran with it?

Well, if you wanted to follow the latest headlines about the top 100 technology companies in CrunchBase you'd try to locate a Twitter user who obsessively searched for new mentions, sorted out the best sources, and shared the most-relevant stories. That's what you'll get if you follow @CrunchAlerts — except that it's a robot that's automated the entire process... More »