Google Plus can and does drive downstream traffic. In the last few days, depending on when I checked, Google Plus was driving anywhere from 90% to 200% the traffic of www.google.com, which as you know, is typically the world's largest driver of consistent traffic. Blogging more often helps, but people do more than +1 here, they click too.

/via my Google+ Profile.

For many of us, our social networking connections have spun out of control. On sites like Facebook and Twitter, we measure our words as for the most part, every update we make goes to everyone. While Facebook has options similar to Google+'s Circles, only a small number of people takes the time to organize their friends, and then uses these setting to communicate in small groups. It's just too hard and too complicated. Katango, a small startup in Palo Alto, funded as part of Kleiner Perkins' sFund, hopes to take the pain out of this maintenance, and automatically make these groups for you, on the back of sharp artificial intelligence.

Yoav Shoman, a Stanford professor, hopes that Katango will help provide an experience that helps users interact with each other more efficiently with friends online. Yee Lee, vice president of product, formerly of SGI and Applied Materials, teamed up with Shoman and a few others to derive sense of the mess we've created for ourselves. They are starting with an iPhone app that mines your Facebook social graph for similarities and shared connections, and in seconds, shows you suggested groupings of your friends, which is extremely accurate and needs only small manual retouching - saving you hours of time that you probably weren't going to spend anyway.



   Katango Scans Your Facebook Social Graph to Find Connections Automatically

Like me, both Yoav and Yee found themselves pruning their Facebook social graphs because the mass had grown unwieldy and they ran into what they called "communication friction", solvable if the social graph could be accurately mapped, enabling you to send messages to a subset of your contacts with shared interests or links.

"We love Facebook, but we don't want to share everything to everyone," Yoav told me in a face to face meeting at their headquarters last month. "People are aware of groups and lists, but don't want to create them."

The goal, at least at the first pass, is to quickly organize your social life, and eliminate these friction points that have people reaching for the Unfriend button - essentially delivering a social platform for social algorithmics, simplifying your network.

In my testing at their HQ, as well as on their iOS app, which is now live on iTunes, the application's capability to distinguish how networks were grouped was tremendously savvy. It managed to separate church members who I attended with before I was married from those where I attended after I was married, thanks to their links and other clues such as listed hometown. It was able to divine which of my social connections on Facebook came after we had first met on FriendFeed, and even more amazingly, practically made a dedicated group in the application of the actual FriendFeed staff and their spouses - something I wouldn't even have considered.


   Katango Nailed The FriendFeed Team and Lets Me Update the Family

Surely, the app isn't completely infallible. It accurately found all members of my family with whom I share links on Facebook, but also added my best friends from high school and their significant others, who might be surprised to find they are now in my extended family tree. It also put a few top social geeks from external geographies as living in the Bay Area, when that's not the case. But in seconds, the app delivered something like 95% accuracy where I've been living closer to 0%, and from the iPhone app, I can now tailor messages and shares just to these groups on their own without hitting my entire network.

My 0% solution is pretty much the norm for most Facebookers, Yoav argued, comparing the gulf between what is and what could be to the early days of the Web.

"It's Yahoo! and Google all over again," he said. "Yahoo! was curating the Web by hand and Google made the algorithm. We are still in the manual phase of social."

Katango launches with the background hubbub around Google+ and its manual circles having launched just in the last two weeks. One of the service's major differentiators against Facebook is the option to group people and communicate against these smaller lists. Katango now reduces that gap, and might be a good fit inside a company that wants to help its users eliminate the manual process which has so far stopped most of them in its tracks.

You can find Katango on the iTunes store here. An Android app is surely coming, but they want a little love from Steve Jobs and team in Cupertino by being exclusive on iOS first.

Having lived through the rise and fall of FriendFeed, the slow rise and then rapid quickening of Twitter, and the "not quite right for this world" debut and subsequent dismissal of Buzz, I practically feel like a grizzled old social networking veteran. (But don't say expert, for that meets with an icy stare of doom) Now that the digerati and their extended circles are finding their way to Google+ and poking the system for cracks, learning what works and what doesn't, and counting each others' numbers, we're in reruns over people deciding what activity should or should not be permissible. And once again, the tools are always there to help the user deal with something that isn't a perfect match for their interests.

As you know, my bias is toward systems having the capability to learn my interests, and show me what I want to see, while avoiding that which I don't. It's what my6sense is all about, and why I've tried my unfair share of personalization tools. But barring these systems, people need to understand that you just might find content that isn't what you're looking for, and you should just keep going - even in new-fangled systems like Google+, where circling people according to the content they share, or the content you want to share them, is a major defining feature.

As mentioned last week in my serious but slightly tongue in cheek guide to "giving good social", you should both "Prove You're a Human" while also "Learning the Community" (points 6 and 7 for those keeping track). This is something I experienced early on with FriendFeed, in 2008, as sharing my family as part of my online personae became a defining element. When I went days or weeks without updates on the kids, or pictures and video, I would get all sorts of private messages (or public messages) demanding I provide more. So I make no apologies for the occasional baby photo or family update that creeps into my otherwise tech-centric feed.


The thing about social networks is that they are built out of people. While this makes cynics say that "You are the Product", in essence, they are right. Social networks are simply tools and systems configured to help you get in touch with or update your connections in simple ways or innovative ways. I would no sooner ask my friends to stop talking about movies and television or sharing their favorite recipes as I would tell them how to dress or wear their hair. If there's too much "nonsense" or silliness at a certain time or with a certain group, I know that things will return to the mean.


In the early days of Google+, a lot of the talk was about Google+. In theory, this is somewhat normal as well. Those posts dedicated to top tips, how tos, or simply repeating Google updates, were among the most shared across the network. People complained about the "Meta" feeling this brought. But Twitter has been the same way. Tweets about Twitter get retweeted. FriendFeed posts about FriendFeed got engagement. Social sites love hearing about themselves, and people love positive reinforcement that tells them they have made the right decision to spend their time in one place or another.

And as soon as the "Hey! We're here!" wears off, then will come the sharing of real world activities, just like real people, settling down and using the tools as they were designed. That means cat photos, baby pictures, food shots, glamor pics, TV reviews, and Justin Bieber. Deal with it. Some of the pure tech followers will grimace, but hope is just a mute button or a reassignment in Circles away. At least products like FriendFeed, Google+ and Facebook have given you that option to hide specific updates from people, whereas with Twitter you pretty much get all of it or none of it.

In this honeymoon phase of Google+, you are going to see a tug of war of sorts between those people who can't wait for the masses to be invited in, and those who dread it. Like every social situation, those who were there first will feel an air of superiority over the newbies, and the newbies will change the network to fit their own interests. It's the way of the world. Google+ was designed to ready you for this, as people come in and you assign them appropriately, and tools are coming soon to Facebook to automatically categorize folks in much the same way.

MyLikes CEO Bindu Reddy, (Standard disclosure: I am an advisor to MyLikes) with a smile no doubt, said "Beginning to see some cat pictures in my feed already... Next come the babies :))" yesterday morning, a sure sign that people were settling in. It's a good thing. When I shared a photo of a Sunday evening picnic with the family, however, a less happy user challenged me, saying, "Doesn't this fit better into your Family circle? Just asking..." and when I said I disagreed, he responded, "Then you are misusing Google+. Don't get me wrong, your twins are cute and everything, but I'm only interested in your tech related posts.. And you could spare me, and others, the effort to mute this kind of posts."


Having been through this before, it doesn't bug me. I think he's wrong, and he can't force me to put pictures of my kids in a secret place that only my family and closest friends can see. There will be occasions when some of those shares will be to a limited circle, but other times, it's for everyone. Similarly, I started a regular tradition called #StoryCircle (as noted by ReadWriteWeb) that encourages people to share a story about themselvse that's personal. I did the same thing on FriendFeed (then called #SaturdayFF). I may stay awake to stupid hours and read and share my unfair percentage of content, but I am not a robot, and I don't expect to behave like one. So if you are investing your time in a social network that is made out of people, you should expect people to act like people. If you can't handle people being real, then you probably need to make an adjustment to your expectations.

Of course, with leaderboards debuting, and numbers jumping for practically everyone, it can be easy to lose sight of why people are participating in these places, eschewing real conversation for statistical games. But no matter my numbers, I will continue to be human, and expect you to do the same. If I don't like what you share, you can be sure I'll move you around, and I expect you'll do the same as well, but attacking humans for being human leaves everyone just a bit more alone.

Disclosures: I am an unpaid advisor to MyLikes and have a small equity stake. I am VP of Marketing at my6sense. Also, the main image is via Wikia.com and can be found here.

This summer, I've spent a good amount of time working with teen entrepreneurs working on their brand new projects and companies as part of Teens In Tech's new incubator initiative, aimed to help these young entrepreneurs focus and deliver on their ideas. The culminating point of the summer will be this August 5th, when all of the companies are unveiled at a special Demo Day as part of the 2011 conference, held at the historic Palo Alto Research Center, also featuring top tier speakers from the world of Web services, venture capital and tech.

When I joined the advisory board to Teens In Tech more than two years ago, I did so with the intent of helping young innovators get access to the resources they need to convert their concepts to reality. In addition to the Teens In Tech blog, which has seen increased activity of late, team-ups with TEDxYouth on the East Coast, and the annual conference, launching this summer's incubator has been very rewarding. I've sat in on strategy sessions as the teens work together to find the best way to outline their product, tweaked Google AdWords campaigns, redesigned email copy, and all the blocking and tackling necessary as companies mature. This year's conference is the biggest one yet, and unveiling the incubated companies is going to be a big win - not just for those going live, but those attending.

Daniel Brusilovsky, CEO and founder of Teens in Tech, has rounded up some A-list sponsors, including GM, Microsoft, Eventbrite, RadTech, Vapur, Meshin and others. Speakers include Andrew Hsu, founder of Airy Labs, Daniela Lapidous, founder of SmartPowerEd, Joey Primiani of Cortex, Michael Simmons, cofounder of Flexibits, and more solid presenters that share the same vision I do, of helping Teens take their tech plans to the next level.

Being an advisor to Teens in Tech has its privileges. I'll be at the conference, but I also snagged discount tickets at 25% off list. I hope you'll join us August 5th. Sign up at http://2011teensintech.eventbrite.com/.

Disclosure: I am an unpaid advisor to Teens in Tech, and have a small equity stake in the company.