Katango: organizing your social network

If you have 200, 300, 400 or more friends on Facebook, how can you sort through them all to identify the subset with which you want to have more meaningful contact? Katango has been building a solution for almost two years, and the result is an innovative approach to grouping your friends and organizing your social network.

"I look at my social universe, and I have five to ten thousand contacts spread across multiple address books, and I communicate over probably 7 different channels," explains Yoav Shoham, Founder and Chairman of Katango. "I don't need another address book or another social network, I need a social secretary. And that's our job—to bring algorithmics to tame this social tsunami."

Version 1.0 of Katango's app analyzes your phone contact data as well as Facebook data to create your friend clusters—high school friends, friends from work, former colleagues, etc. Future versions will look at data from other sources as well.

"We believe the key is recreating context," says Shoham. "In my social universe right now, it's not only that it got large and fragmented, I've lost context. Here I am interacting with you in a very particular context. If I just throw you into my Facebook friends, if I'm lucky enough for you to accept my friend request, you'll be lost in the crowd of near 400 [friends] or how ever many I have, but I've lost that context. Our job is to recreate that context."

Katango set a goal of analyzing the data in 10 seconds or less and producing results that were at least 95% accurate. These were lofty ambitions for such a challenging undertaking, so Katango approached the problem from a unique perspective.

"Optimizing a feed of any kind—be it a Facebook feed, an RSS feed, or whatever it is—is so difficult," says Shoham. "It's such a high dimensional space that our starting point is a little different. Rather than take this torrent and try to learn it using various machinery and techniques, we start by trying to understand your relationships. And that becomes a very interesting filter through which to understand how to give you something that's pleasant and productive for you."

The Katango app is mobile-focused and designed for simplicity of use. "You take your phone and download the app," explains Shoham. "As soon as you open it up, it explains what it's about to do, then it asks you to Facebook Connect. Within seconds, you are dropped into a screen and you simply see your friend clusters in front of you, and you do basic functions with them—you get to name them...you get to hone them, you can add people and delete people, then you start communicating with them. It's very simple...You can think of it as a private Facebook within Facebook."

More info:

Katango web site: http://www.katango.com/
Katango profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/katango
Katango on Twitter: http://twitter.com/KatangoApp
Katango on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Katangoapp

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• social network
• katango
• facebook
• facebook connect

[arulanandcisco]

Why Google bought this???

Google Plus already has these functions ....

[markcocjin]

Well Google just bought this recently...

[khamenya]

video could be shorter.

socks are OK though.

[JudgeNik]

Hmm same take on social media as what Google+ is doing.

It will be very interesting if Katango exports to Google circles or gets bought by someone else

[mikesbasstube]

great interview and conversation with Yoav Shoham! it's magic! 

[stepherdavis]

Katango. Yup. Mind-blowing. #socialmedia #SMO #SMM

[jacqueshugo]

Is this available on Android?

[Cruzzzzz1988]

although I think this is a great new thing, this guy is really not that good in explaining and giving interviews. they should get someone else to do the PR, i almost fell asleep

[VagoTravels]

Seriously...what about for those of us who don't use mobile or apple products? I want to try it, but I don't want to buy an iPhone to do it... vago

[dNinot]

I tried it out and it's pretty amazing. My next question is: how do I get Katango for non-mobile facebook?