Google Acquires Katango, for Automatic Circles in Google+

Google has acquired a small startup that is a perfect fit for Google+. Katango makes an iPhone app designed to make it easier to group Facebook friends and share only with one group or another.

In essence, it enabled Facebook users to do what Google+ can do by default with circles, however, it also automated the process of creating the friends lists.

"Katango was founded a little over a year ago to develop social algorithms that improve people's online social interaction," the Katango team wrote in an announcement.   

"We're excited to join the Google+ team and carry on fulfilling that mission. Google+ is seeing tremendous momentum, so it's a perfect time to join and make Circles smarter for millions of people," it said.

"We're incredibly grateful to our investors, team members, and users who made Katango awesome," it added.

Google wanted the people behind Katango, as is usually the case with these small acquisitions, but it also wanted the technology this time.

It makes sense too, circles are great for sharing with different groups of people, but the main complaint about them is that they're hard to create and maintain, especially as users add more Google+ friends.

So far, Google hasn't done much, it hasn't done anything really, to automate the process, users have to manually add each friend to the right circle, which can become a chore.

Facebook on the other hand debuted a feature that automatically grouped your work buddies or school colleagues together. It's dubbed Smart Lists and, while it's fairly limited at the time, it's more than Google+ offers.

Katango technology comes in great though as it can be adapted for Google+ and turned into a feature. It's not hard to imagine that in the not so distant future, Google will start suggesting which people go in which circles, based on various criteria.