Google+ UI is the future of event driven software

Everybody following up the exciting world of Internet services and Social media industries has probably heard about Google+, the new social networking service that Google has created to challenge Facebook, the current leader of social networking services. In their quest to challenge Facebook, Google has made tremendous amount of work to invent and innovate new features and new ways to interact for their service, many of which we in the software industry should take a note from and learn, one of these things being the user interface.

One particular innovation that I have especially been impressed is Circles. Circles is a logical innovation to the Facebook innovated event based user interface. In Facebook the centerpiece of the user interface is the personal event queue which consists from incoming notifications that have been generated by our friend and from an outgoing event queue where we push our new notifications. This is brilliantly simple and allows us easily to connect and share events with friends. The problem in this arrangement however is that as the amount of our friends grow, we start to drown to new notifications and start missing relevant events, we also start to become more hesitant on sharing new events because we don't want to bother friends with updates to them that useless and because we want to keep something inside a smaller circle. This is the stepping point for Circles.

Facebook - Single queue vs. Google+ - multiple queue

In Circles you have multiple event queues for different people. You can have an Circle for friends, family, work colleagues, etc... You can also group one person to multiple Circles, for example a work colleague can also belong to friends circle. This way you can easily share updates with the right kind of people, but also quickly see what different groups of people are doing. This is of course goes both ways, people belonging to your circles can also freely decide on which circle you belong. This simple idea makes it easy again to share and receive events. This is the idea that should be copied to any software that deals with peoples and events that they generate.

Many different kinds of software and services could benefit from implementing Google+ Circles type of multiple event queues driven user interface. For a example CRM software could instead of concentrating to display information about overall sales or about a customer in hand, the main interface to the software would be an list of events to which the specific user is tied. These events could be automatically lifted from email or from calendar or from phone, they could also be generated from external sources such as customers RSS feed or picked from web sites or magazines. Events themselves could be grouped by either customer or customer types. However the key to deliver added value would be the ability to share events with the internal organizations, allowing rapid communication and sharing of relevant information in timely manner. One example of CRM software that has tried to go this way is the Salesforce Chatter, in my opinion Salesforce could have went farther in their implementation, but it anyway demonstrates many of the strengths of being event centric. Countless other types of software could also be made event centric, for example why not plug-in version control software and JIRA to multiple event queues, allowing developers to note changes more quickly, enable sharing of thoughts and useful resources. In my honest opinion many software firms would do themselves a favor on investigating if they could transform their software to be event centric.