When you start with Peers.me you might wonder why we still stick with Wave. Isn’t that the ridiculed faux pas by Google that left most of its users puzzled? Their senseless technocratic approach to change something nobody regarded as problematic? Well, yes and no. Google introduced Wave during their Google I/O in 2009. It took them a 90-minute video to explain it’s many features and endless possibilities. They raised expectation to the max taking up the glove against email. On the 4th of August 2010 Google announced they where no longer planning to offer Wave as a standalone product; a decision that let to fears speculations and lots of cynical laughter by Wave’s many criticasters. For a company that kept a wiki clone (knoll) for years in digital coma, it was at least a surprisingly fast decision. What happened? Was it really that bad? Looking back it is easy to pinpoint some blunt mistakes Google made. It’s not wise to launch a communication tool with a relatively slow invitation-only model. Many users were alone in a service that was designed for dynamic conversations and stayed alone there for many days or even weeks. The service was jammed with features but lacked some essential parts like a simple connection with email. The user interface was unfriendly and perhaps even intimidating because of the real time collaboration. (Hey, there is someone typing in my text!”) It was launched as an open source project, but it was too hard to anticipate Google’s development let alone participate in any way in the overall development. This kept most developers passive. So yes, users where puzzled and critical mistakes where certainly made. But that’s only part of the story. The wave server at the core of the project is brilliant. It solves a couple of real problems that block the introduction of scalable real time mass communication. The idea of a communication system that allows you to integrate all sorts of intelligent tools directly in the conversation is spot on. There are some real problems with email. One is the almost complete lack of integration in workflows. After 30 years email is still a relatively stand-alone – not so clever – communication tool. Basically it’s nothing more but a digital letter machine. And multi-user conversations with email do tend to become fuzzy. When you read the many evaluations after Google’s announcement to stop Wave as a public service it was fair to conclude people who worked in small groups with wave did appreciate it. So “no” it wasn’t senseless. Wave solves a couple of real problems and was both loved and laughed at. It wasn’t much of a surprise that wave development continued as an Apache open source project. We decided to go on developing our own wave service while keeping a few lessons in mind.

1. Keep it simple and user friendly; don’t start with fancy real time features
2. Focus on group communication as a complementary service next to email
3. Don’t think of wave as a big public (social) network but rather as a business solution on top of ERP and workflow management. In particular workflows that run straight through the boundaries of organisations like customer support and innovation management.
4. Stop reading What Would Google Do.

For the past year we’ve been working parallel on the Apache Wave project on our own “federation ready” wave service. The backbone of our service is group communication: hosted conversations with wave; together with a very basic structure of group inboxes and federation of multiple networks. Right now we are working on several API’s that allow you to integrate waves and inboxes in your workflow management tools. Soon you can build your own user interface on top of our Peers Wave server. We use the term “Wave” because it’s not a note, comment, blog, message, mail or whatever. We use the Wave technological principals simply because they solve the problems that occur daily in businesses world-wide. And we aim to connect with other wave servers in the future. On an average day 30 billion emails are send. Why not wave a couple of billion? Peers  Wave Communication