Google the world’s leading search engine has long been developing other features and cool software online. One of their latest projects was Google+ the social networking system that allows people to “+1” content similar to how they can “like” it by clicking a Facebook button.
The core networks are quite different from each other but Google sure does see Facebook as a competitor with its 800 million user base and growing. Google is poised to make sure that their social network gets the credit it deserves and continues to innovate and they have recently bought Katango a feature which improves the “Circles” aspect of Google.
The Katango ( www.katango.com )  site now redirects to: https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.katango.com/announcement.html which explains that they were just acquired by google. Their homepage read’s:
” ‘s circle just got bigger — because we’re joining !
Katango was founded a little over a year ago to develop social algorithms that improve people’s online social interaction.   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.
We’re incredibly grateful to our investors, team members, and users who made Katango awesome.   We can’t thank you enough.”
The Katango site is showing that Google is moving aggressively forward with this deal and integrating this technology as soon as possible into their systems. This system helps automate some of their Google circles feature by making it a lot easier to make friend lists on social networks and launched an iPhone application in July and did not release it on the web until August. This is a much needed system for Google to compete seeing as Facebook as their own homegrown solution for all of this automated friend grouping type activity which launched in September.
They have now removed the Katango app from the app store as well showing that Google is very serious about white labeling it into their product. This is an important technology as people are becoming more interested in privacy issues and what information they want to release to who and on what networks etc. This is a Global Good technology of sorts because it is allowing people to have more confidence in their online communication and information sharing which is key to innovation and growth…. Go Google!