Peers.me Will Replace Your Group Emails with Google Wave-like Waves

Lets start a wave! No, not a Mexican wave… No, not a Google Wave, that service is (un)fortunately offline now. I’m talking about a Wave at Peers.me, an advanced messaging web application for groups.

You know a service is for you when it uses a .me domain name, don’t you? 😉 Well, before we start “waving” remember you can get a .me for your web startup in the .Me domain development program.

Why Waves?

With the advent of Google+ we’ve seen a lot of people talk, tweet and blog about giving up on e-mail as a means to contact people. If you’re like MG Siegler of Techcrunch for example, you want threaded conversations that you can move fast in as well as archive when needed. For all the goodies that advanced webmail services like Gmail give us, email is: email.

Peers.me is actually not trying to replace anything. It is however trying to clean up your email inbox and make your social networking easier and organized. Peers.me’s waves are basically conversations that let you host a small forum on a service that’s free for your first 10 users.

A small company could use it to organize their internal conversations. For example, you could have a group with daily waves to handle orders or project communication while at the same time hosting a wave where your team can post project ideas for a couple of months.

Waves, Groups and Conversations in Between

Peers.me is pretty easy to grasp, which is good since it will let you have conversations from the start. No complex enterprise software, just a good web app you can actually use. You’ll notice the big green New wave button, lets start from there.

Each Peers.me wave is a new conversation where you can add images, links and most importantly: people. Just click the plus icon and either add someone from your team or add the wave to a group. We’ll cover groups a little bit later, suffice it to say their a way of organizing your Peers.me network.

• Peers.me waves are not unlike email conversations. You can:
• Follow or unfollow a wave;
• Mark a wave as unread or read;
• Archive a wave;
• Add specific event data to the wave.

Since waves are conversations, you’ll find it pretty easy to converse with them with your friends or colleagues. Keep in mind that waves unline emails won’t clutter your inbox (unless you turn on email notifications).

You can organize waves into groups for the various teams or projects. Add a group for that last website you were building or one for the whole marketing team. Hardcore developers need their own group as well, and creating a group is pretty easy. Like your individual profile, it needs a name and an image (if you want it to look good).

Bits, Bites and Polish

Peers.me is one of those services you know was made by a developer to scratch their own itch. It already has an API as well as a WordPress plugin. It will offer you lots of small nuggets of feature-goodness:

• Profiles slide out if you click someone’s avatar;
• Groups have their own dedicated @ marker;
• Every view is actually a filter and you can save filters you like.

Unfortunately, Peers.me gives you a lot of features but the interface is lacking not only polish but a bit of usability. While [tags] appeal to the html junkie in all of us, typical users will want to have a more Facebook-like interface. Don’t get me wrong: Peers.me offers a simple way to host conversations on the web and organize them accordingly. I do hope however they’ll get a designer to create a great user interface. Their app and users deserve it. You can open your own Peers.me network for up to 10 users for free.