Automated aggregation of social contact groups

Abstract

An electronic device is configured with a social contact group aggregation system that operates to identify similar groups of contacts that are associated with different social applications and aggregate those groups into a single, unified group with which the device user may interact. When the device user uses a social application to create or import a new group of social contacts, the aggregation system can apply one or more of various aggregation factors to determine if the new group matches a pre-existing group and then aggregate the new group into the existing group if a match is identified. The aggregation factors illustratively include the similarity of names between the new and an existing group, the degree to which social contacts in the groups are already linked, the similarity of profile information among members of the groups, and other associative factors.