Paul Papadimitriou

But Google+ has a feature that’s analogous to Facebook’s Friend Lists: Circles. And while Google has promoted Circles heavily, both in its marketing and on Google+ itself, it doesn’t do much in the way of automatically helping users sort their friends into Circles — there’s still a lot of legwork involved. Which Katango seems perfectly suited to help with.

As I hinted at recently, I don’t think algorithms can yet achieve the true fabric of human relationships.

Now, Facebook Smart Lists make a decent job of breaking it down for me, but only in the most obvious ways: location, occupation, school. The suggestions given to me are usually odd, but I’m also odd, having lived in so many cities, having no particular place I stayed too long in, having no family linked, being my lone wolf-self or something.

Google+ has nothing like that. Katango is thus a natural fit, but I don’t see yet making it a better experience than on Facebook.

Cross-contextual data is where those algorithms should look next.