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.

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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.