Kleiner-Backed Katango Organizes Your Facebook Friends Into Groups For You
Perhaps there's something to these friend circle/list/groups after all. — As you've doubtless heard by now, Google recently launched a social network that revolves around one core idea: people want to share different things …
Context & Ripple Effects
Katango is arriving four years after Facebook itself flagged the problem: its September 2007 plan to let users group friends was framed as a killer feature, but it never became the organizing principle of the product. Google's 2008 move to harvest social-graph data through an API showed how valuable structured relationship data was considered to be.
The timing is not accidental. Google+ has just launched around Circles — sharing different things with different groups — and Kleiner Perkins is backing a startup that applies the same core idea to Facebook's much larger graph rather than waiting for Facebook to build it natively. A tier-one firm funding an unaffiliated company to fix a gap in the market leader's product is a bet on where social design is heading.
First-order effects
- Facebook users get a third-party tool that slices their friend list without manual curation — functionality Facebook announced in 2007 but did not ship as a central feature.
Second-order effects
- Katango's entire product sits on top of Facebook's API, so Facebook can commoditize or choke it overnight by shipping native friend grouping — the same pressure pattern Google faced when it opened its own social graph to developers in 2008.
- Google+'s Circles-centric design gets independent validation: if a Kleiner-backed team builds a whole company around automatic grouping, the premise that users want audience-segmented sharing gains credibility against Facebook's flat friend model.
Third-order effects
- Social networking may be entering a phase where the base friend graph is treated as commodity infrastructure and differentiation moves up-stack to how sharing is organized — with platform owners holding kill-switch power over the startup layer built on them.
- Venture capital chasing a Google+ launch moment suggests investor appetite for companies that retrofit new interaction models onto incumbent graphs, a pattern that tends to end in acquisition or extinction once incumbents copy the feature.
The trend: Audience-segmented sharing is becoming the default design assumption of social products, with startups rushing to retrofit it onto platforms whose owners can absorb the idea at any time.