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.

A deeply felt “Thank you!” to all the participants in the Ångströ’s Beta Test program for Noteworthy News, our service that delivers news about people and companies in your professional network.

For anyone with active accounts or subscriptions to our personalized email newsletters, we have scheduled shutdown of the Beta Test program on Friday, August 20th.

In our privacy philosophy, we made a commitment to each of our users never to sell their information to a third party. Nor do we store anyone's passwords, either for LinkedIn, Twitter, or for any other service.

We have decided to explore other options for Ångströ, Inc. with third parties, thus we are shutting down the service and destroying any personally identifiable information (PII) retained by Noteworthy News.

Users will have the opportunity to download their own data, of course. Users can view the list of news stories they have reviewed using links in the left-hand navigation bar (look for Feedback, then Confirmed or Rejected). Users can can also export it using RSS or Atom.

On behalf of the entire team, we would like to thank our users again for their participation and support since our debut at TechCrunch50. If you have any questions or concerns about this transition, please email support@angstro.com.

— Rohit Khare & Salim Ismail, Co-founders, Ångströ, Inc.

PS. Service for @CrunchAlerts , KNX.to, and Disco Explorer may also be affected.

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.

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!