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When comparing Facebook to Google+, there is much talk about the ability in Google+ to easily create isolated groups of friends, label them and access them. Katango is an app that changes the game. Katango automatically organizes your friends into these groups – it can scan your Facebook friends list and sort people into groups based on shared connections.

Katango is free and intuitive. After you give it permissions, it creates the groups instantly and in terms of accuracy is quite impressive. When I used it, it amazingly grouped my fraternity friends, my optometric colleagues and my social media contacts into convenient yet separate groups. It even separated my family members! A few groups were unimportant or random, but are easy to delete and reorganize.

The limitation of Katango is that while you can communicate with status updates and photos in individual groups, you can’t sync it back to the real Facebook. Sending updates within the app is easy however and it is possible to live your Facebook life on Katango if all you use Facebook for is messaging and sharing photos.

While limited in usefulness at this point, I could see the usefulness of integrating the technology into Facebook or other social networks. I think you will see Katango, or a similar app, merged with Facebook soon to enable Facebook the similar functionality currently available in Google+, enabling it to remain competitive over the long term with the Google 900lb gorilla!

Have you signed up for Google+ or Facebook yet? I have a limited number of Google invites, so like the Facebook page “OnToptics” and request a Google+ invite and I’ll be sure to send one if I have one left. If you try Katango, please share your feedback on SightNation. For those of you on LinkedIn, I have expanded OnToptics, a page where I continue the discussion on search optimization and have expanded it to cover social media marketing and hope you connect there.

- Alan N. Glazier, OD, FAAO
Author: Searchial Marketing: How Social Media Drives Search Optimization in Web 3.0
Founder/CEO
Shady Grove Eye and Vision Care
Rockville, MD

Twitter Handle: @EyeInfo
Blog: http://www.youreyesite.net
Website: YourEyeSite.com

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