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You’re in line for coffee. You really want to check your family’s Facebook posts to see if there’s anything you need to know about, but they’re lost among status updates from friends. You never did spend the time to create a group of just your relatives, so there you are, thumbing through your iPhone’s entire news feed.
You don’t have to live this way. A new app called Jildy, released for the iPhone last week and under development for Android phones, sorts your Facebook friends into lists of those who interact with one another, so you can read or post to just those people quickly.
There was an app called Katango that did this. But after a high-profile debut last July, Katango was bought by Google in November, and the app is no longer available in Apple’s App Store. Jildy also does a few things Katango didn’t.
Using Jildy is easy. Download it from the App Store and fire it up. The first time you start it, flick the switch to turn Facebook access from Off to On. If you already have Facebook’s app on your phone, you won’t even need to log in. You will be presented with a familiar screen that prompts you to grant permission for Jildy to access some of your Facebook information, just like any other Facebook app. Click Allow, and Jildy will spend a few seconds loading your friend lists and sorting them.
To read or post to Jildy’s lists, tap the Lists icon in the app’s lower left corner. The automatic grouping is surprisingly accurate, since most Facebook users tend to post or comment to one another in isolated groups. To fine-tune a list, tap it. Jildy will switch to a screen with icons of the most frequent recent posters. In the upper right corner is an arrow key. Tap that, and choose the List Info option. There, you can edit the name and membership of the group. That same arrow icon also lets you post an update or share a photo with just the members of the group.
An Internet pundit, Clay Shirky, has said that the problem with services like Facebook is not information overload, it’s filter failure. Jildy Inc.’s chief executive, Mark Drummond, who previously created the unsuccessful but technically impressive Wowd social search engine, says Jildy’s developers aim to solve Mr. Shirky’s problem by whittling down your Facebook feeds into chunks you will find usable on a mobile phone, where your attention span and screen size are much smaller than they are on a laptop or at a desk.
When you look at a list, Jildy presents screens of who is posting the most in the last 12 hours, and what words or phrases are appearing most. Are the gang from San Francisco talking about Burning Man in January? Maybe something is up that you need to check. Tap the on-screen box labeled “burning man,” and Jildy will show you the group’s posts on the topic, which it has already searched. It digs back more than a few days, so you can catch up on conversation topics you may have missed during the holidays.
Jildy also has a feature called PSI (it stands for “personal social intelligence”) that creates cutesy charts of the statistical distribution of your Facebook friends by age, gender, relationship status, and astrological sign. I was surprised to learn that the majority of my friends are married, and 40 percent of them are women. There are other ways I could have figured this out, but Jildy did it for me in a few seconds while I was poking through lists on my phone. That’s the idea: to present the information you probably want, ready to go on your phone. Until Google figures out what it’s going to do with Katango, Jildy is well worth a test drive.
