Katango

Jan 10, 2012

What’s wrong with this picture? Jon Mitchell via ReadWriteWeb Ever since we broke the news about Google’s circles, it seemed like a necessary new social networking feature. The ability to selectively share with the right groups of people is an important part of being oneself on the Web. But the effort required to maintain G circles is discouraging. Facebook’s smart lists solve the problem remarkably well. Hopefully, the Katango team will help Google help us keep our online social lives organized. A feature that is touted as ‘helping’ us with the 'management’ of our social connections turns out to be too time consuming: the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. But instead of realizing that obsessively segregating and resegregating your friends into different cliques is a bit obsessive, and basically impossible if you have a lot of connections, the brilliant folks at Google decide to use software to be obsessive on your behalf. Now, in some cases, having software do things for you makes sense, like backing up your file system. But there is a reason that our operating systems don’t automatically create the folder set up on your hard drive: we are too idiosyncratic about where we want to put our files. Same thing with friends.