A New App Automatically Groups Your Facebook Friends

Updated to add some information about Google+.

Facebook users have long had the ability to create lists of their friends, so they can share one status update with, say, co-workers, and another with college friends. But manually creating the groups is time-consuming, especially if you’ve accumulated hundreds of friends from different parts of your life (this, of course, is one of the appeals of Google+, in that putting people in groups on that service is necessary, immediate and easy). A new iPhone app solves that problem by looking at your friends’ public Facebook data and automatically creating the groups for you — at least on your phone.

Katango looks at your friends' public Facebook data and creates groups for you. Katango looks at your friends’ public Facebook data and creates groups for you.

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Katango is a free app recently released for the iPhone, and coming in the near future to Android phones. Download the app, launch it, sign in with your Facebook account and tap the Groups button at the bottom of the screen. Using recent advances in clustering math, Katango takes only a few seconds to create multiple groups of users who interact with one another. In my case, it created 11 groups: people I went to high school with, people I went to college with, people who blog about tech all the time, friends from the San Francisco coffeehouse scene, and several others. Just as important, most of my 985 friends weren’t grouped, because they’re mostly random readers or people who friend everyone.

You can give each group a name, and edit its membership by adding or deleting members. Start at the bottom of each group’s membership list to edit it, since Katango sorts each group by putting those likely to belong at the top, and those who may be outliers at the bottom. You can also create your own groups — but then, you probably haven’t done that on Facebook either.

Once you’ve got your groups, you can share a status update with one or more of them from your phone. You can post text messages or photos, which can be new photos or those already in your iPhone camera roll. Your updates will be posted to their Facebook walls as a private post that only the recipients can see, comment on or Like. You can also add e-mail contacts from your phone’s address book to groups — they’ll get your updates via e-mail.

There’s one downside: Katango deliberately does not upload its groups back to Facebook. You’ll have to use the app.