Swipp had been quietly honing its social search system for nearly two years when Facebook sprung a big surprise this month, launching a similar system called Graph Search. In the wake of that big announcement, the Mountain View-based startup has decided to go public too, exiting a lengthy "stealth mode" and briefing the media on how the service works – and how it's different from Facebook.

Swipp is hardly the first tech project Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has outraced; he famously launched Facebook at Harvard on a tighter, more fevered schedule than the university’s own planned online student directory, and left behind fellow students building a similar site called "Harvard Connection."

But the Swipp team isn't licking its wounds. The company has been making the tech media rounds in recent weeks, orchestrating a flurry of launch stories that dropped this week. Swipp is teeing up a genuinely different product with real potential. The company could become the first to prove the commercial viability of a more open social network, one that shares data back with users instead of keeping it locked up. In so doing, it would lend momentum to the growing ranks of businesses and people uncomfortable sharing so much data with Facebook, and thus exact some revenge, however mild, back onto Zuckerberg.

“The larger the company we talk to about Swipp, the more fascinating it is to them,” says Swipp CEO Don Thorson, formerly of Apple and Netscape. “They have a party between them and their customer and it’s not tenable.”

Swipp doesn’t allow open-ended queries like Facebook Graph Search. Instead, you use it to search for specific people, places, and things, which have (hopefully) been assigned simple 1-5 ratings and tagged in photos by other Swipp users. Swipp supplements this social data with hard information from Freebase, a collaborative database. Swipp calls the blend of information it offers “social intelligence.” Users feed data back into this system with a “Swipp It” features that lets them rate and comment on people, places, and things.

Swipp also claims it will be a significantly more open platform than Facebook, allowing users rights to download and easily re-use the information they put into the system. Swipp also says it will open up and API with fewer restrictions than those imposed on the Facebook API. The idea is to create an omnipresent social network and ratings system that can be emedded and re-used anywhere on the web, for example on e-commerce sites or communities operated by large companies. Swipp would then make its money selling specialized analytics to these companies.

Swipp says the consumer-facing iPhone and web apps it just launched today, at swipp.com, is just the tip of the iceberg for the social platform it is building. Hopefully it won’t take another two years to reveal the next big chunk of that iceberg – just imagine how much a scrappy competitor like Facebook can get done in that period of time.