Abstract: Techniques are disclosed herein for providing customized news alerts for a user's contacts in a network environment via a news delivery service that includes a synchronization service for synchronizing contact information in the user's address books. Relevant newsworthy aspects can be extracted using a contact distillation service. Distilled contacts data is normalized or generalized using a data normalization service. The news delivery service also includes a news ingestion and analysis service for obtaining news feeds from various data sources. News articles or posts in the news feeds are analyzed to determine a priority score that can be used to match the articles or posts with a specific contact in the address books based at least partially on the distilled and normalized data using a news-to-contact matching and prioritization service. Matched articles and contacts can be displayed to the user via an application user interface for transmission to the contacts.

Abstract: Disclosed is a system having a plurality of user devices, a plurality of databases, and servers in communication over a network. Each of the devices synchronizes one or more address books comprising contact information. The contact information is enhanced and then cleansed. The enhanced contact information is then hashed so that the personally identifiable information is made unavailable. The system then identifies common contacts representing the same real person and creates a single composite view of the person. Thereafter, the system shares the single composite view between users while obfuscating information that personally identifies such contacts.

Abstract: Techniques are disclosed herein for providing customized news alerts for a user's contacts in a network environment via a news delivery service that includes a synchronization service for synchronizing contact information in the user's address books. Relevant newsworthy aspects can be extracted using a contact distillation service. Distilled contacts data is normalized or generalized using a data normalization service. The news delivery service also includes a news ingestion and analysis service for obtaining news feeds from various data sources. News articles or posts in the news feeds are analyzed to determine a priority score that can be used to match the articles or posts with a specific contact in the address books based at least partially on the distilled and normalized data using a news-to-contact matching and prioritization service. Matched articles and contacts can be displayed to the user via an application user interface for transmission to the contacts.

Abstract: Disclosed is a system having a plurality of user devices, a plurality of databases, and servers in communication over a network. Each of the devices synchronizes one or more address books comprising contact information. The contact information is enhanced and then cleansed. The enhanced contact information is then hashed so that the personally identifiable information is made unavailable. The system then identifies common contacts representing the same real person and creates a single composite view of the person. Thereafter, the system shares the single composite view between users while obfuscating information that personally identifies such contacts.