An app to organise Facebook friends

Sharing on Facebook can be complicated if you only want to do so with college friends, colleagues or golf buddies. You have to manually sort potentially hundreds of people into separate groups.

Katango, a free iPhone application, intends to alleviate the hassle by automatically organising Facebook friends.

In theory, its technology would detect who is a family member, who attended the same high school or who lives in the same city and place them in the relevant group.

Users of the app can then reach out to people in a particular group with a message or photo, without spamming or over sharing with everyone one else.

“We’re stuck in the manual stage of social networking,” said Yoav Shoham, Katango’s co-founder. “This will simplify your social life.”

Organising friends is a battleground in social networking after the limited introduction last month of Google’s latest social network, Google +. Google is encouraging users to manually sort their friends into ‘circles’, or groups that are more in keeping with how people maintain friendships offline.

©2011 The New York
Times News Service