Paul Adams, the designer behind the Google+ social networking site, who subsequently moved to Facebook, has quit the company for start-up Intercom.
Adams had been central to the original (much criticised) design of Google+ and has spent the past two years at Facebook - long enough to pick up share options granted before the company went public.
Intercom is a "business collaboration" startup - seemingly focused on marketing - where Adams will be head of product design. According to GigaOM, Adams has been advising Intercom for nine months, sharing his ideas drawn from consumer social networking sites to Intercom's business-focused software-as-a-service.
The start-up claims that it enables users to communicate "with one tool instead of four", combining "lifecycle marketing, customer development, newsletters and support". In the process, the software enables users to better keep track of tasks and activities.
Led by Eoghan McCabe, Intercom the product is formally called Sifter, developed by Garrett Dimon, the founder of Intercom, who set-up the company in August 2008.
Dimon devised Sifter while working at Sapient, an early "web services" company, which survived the 2000 dot-com crash.
"I went to work at Sapient and basically got thrown into very large projects that had to have a formal issue tracking process. So from the moment I was out of college, I was kind of tossed into that world and became very, very knowledgeable about bug and issue tracking," said Dimon in an online interview.
Dimon claims that the company now has between 12,000 and 15,000 users every month, built largely via social media and word-of-mouth.
One of the key ideas that Adams will develop at the company is "circles", in which users can interact with each other based on shared interests.
