The battle is now in the open. In an effort to gain an upper-hand on Google+ Circles, Facebook has introduced a new app – Katango which will sort friends automatically.
The New York Times blog said, “Katango, a free iPhone application introduced on Tuesday, intends to alleviate the hassle of manually sorting friends on Facebook. It automatically organizes your friends on Facebook.”
Katango’s technology will detect who is a family member, who attended the same high school as you or who lives in the same city and places them in relevant groups.
Users can then share a message or a photo with a particular group without sharing it with everyone else.
Katango’s co-founder Yoav Shoham said, “We are stuck in the manual stage of social networking. This will simplify your social life.”
With the introduction of Google+, organizing friends has become a critical feature in social networking. Google encourages, users to manually sort their friends into ‘circles’ which are more in line with how people maintain friends offline.
To get started with Katango, users must connect the Katango app to their Facebook account. Google + is not compatible.
Katango’s algorithm then analyzes profile information, interactions with friends and interactions between friends. Based on that information, the service tries to group related friends together.
Once the process is complete, users of Katango can then share messages and photos with people in a particular group. Users can send content through Katango to people who also have the Katango app; to Facebook pages or via e-mail to friends who are not on Facebook.
In addition to Facebook, Katango can be connected to a user’s contacts on the iPhone or iPad.
Mr. Shoham, who is a computer science professor at Stanford University and previously sold a company to Ariba, a business software company, acknowledges that Katango’s technology is imperfect. After getting the results, users may have to refine them, he said.
The algorithm provides the initial group structure, but users must then hone it, Mr. Shoham said. Over time, he expects the technology to improve.
As of now, Katango’s offering is limited only to Facebook for iPhone, however, the company claims that it is currently working towards extending the compatibility to Twitter and Linked In as well as to other mobile platforms too.
Katango Technologies, was founded a year ago by Chairman Yoav Shoham, and, Michael Munie and Thuc Vu, Stanford PhD graduates. It has since raised $2 million led by an investment from the Kleiner Perkins S Fund (Bing Gordon is on Katango’s board). And they recently brought on Yee Lee as VP of Product, who was earlier with PayPal, Slide, and founder at TipMobile and Crave.
You can download the Katango app here.