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November update

November 29, 2011 by Daniël

Last week we’ve updated Peers.me with some several changes, mostly associated to the group memberships.

The complete list is here, some of the items are explained below:

auto accept and decline group invitation setting for users and groups
dashboard for users and groups displaying pending actions
listing of archived group invitations and requests
new and updated wave emails are grouped in one thread (when supported by mail client)
when unfollowing a group this group will not be included in the daily digest email
improved design and content of daily digest email
contacts are sorted on name instead of wave address
show name of original inviter in invite email when the invite is auto approved by admin
possibillity to resend cancelled email invites
added markup buttons to blip editor
users and group moderators are able to leave a group
listing of all visible users and groups in contactlist
network administrators can set a default group membership invite setting for new users

Bugfixes:

fixed starring of networked contact
fixed double blinking cursor in blip editor
fixed opening of new window when clicking on external link in blip
fixed profile slider for wave addresses with an underscore in it
fixed blip editor when using iPad, keyboard now showing

Notfications in email are grouped in one thread

To keep your email inbox somehow clean, we keep the subject of our notifications to be the same per wave. Your email client (like GMail or Apple Mail) will group the notifications to one thread. Yeah, we’re trying to keep your inbox clean.

Contacts are sorted on name and listing of users and groups

To let you browse your contactlist much easier, the list is now sorted by name. Your favorite contacts are still on top, other conversation partners, your groups and group members are below. Also, we’ve added a users and groups tab (when enabled by the network administrator) with a listing of all visible users and groups.

Markup buttons in the Editor

For easy markup of your waves, the editor makes it possible to add headers or bold text. Just choose the markup, click the icon and start typing.

Something for you developers

If you’re interested in integrating the Peers.me technology into your application or workflow, please contact us at echo@peers.me. We would like to offer you something cool. More on this coming soon!

Cheers, The Peers.me team

Notifications, likes and more

October 5, 2011 by Daniël

We’ve changed our homepage and opened up personal accounts for everyone, so now you can invite all your friends and colleagues to your waves!

We have some nice features in this update:

Update notifications
Group notifications
Like a Wave
Background image (Network Account)

Update notifications

From now on, you’ll receive email notifications if your waves have been updated. We’ll notify you immediately so you can keep up with the conversation. If you don’t want to receive any update notifications, go to your settings and disable the update wave notification setting.

Notification in email inbox

Group notifications

It’s now possible to follow a group you’re member of. When one of your followed groups is added to a wave, we will send you an email notifying you about it. This will also happen when a wave with a followed group as participant is updated. Go to your groups list to follow or unfollow a group. To disable the new or updated wave notifications in general go to your settings.

Like a wave

Waves can be liked from now. Every participant on the wave can like the wave, the total likes can be viewed in the inbox and on the wave. We will add special inbox filters for liked waves later on.

Background image at public pages (Network Account)

You can now upload a background image to match your organisation brand and style. This image will be shown on the login and signup page.

Next up

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile!

Why Wave?

August 23, 2011 by Gerrit Jan van 't Veen

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.

Keep it simple and user friendly; don’t start with fancy real time features
Focus on group communication as a complementary service next to email
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.
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

Personal & Federation

August 19, 2011 by Daniël

We’ve got a big announcement to make: From today we’re making it possible to start your own personal (@peers.me) wave inbox. And if you got a network account, you can start with federated connections to other network accounts.

Personal account @peers.me May 17th, we announced we are working hard on personal accounts for Peers.me. With a personal wave inbox ([yourname]@peers.me) you can start waving with others without the need to create a network account.

You can start a personal account here!

Is it free? It sure is, but a donation would be appreciated. Personal Peers.me is a free service. And we want to keep it that way. Eventually our business model will lean on our API’s for integrating Peers.me in business processes. We plan to launch them by the end of this year. Until then your donation helps us keeping your @peers.me private and ads free.

Can I invite others? Yes you can, just start a wave and enter an email address. We’ll be sending an invite to the email address to create an account and access the wave.

What’s the difference between personal and network account? A personal account is available for everyone. With a network account you’ll have your own subdomain for your organisation. You can create and manage groups and you’ll have complete administrative control over the API, federation settings, number of users and more. Most small businesses and NGO’s go for a network account.

Federation If it’s up to us, everyone has a wave address for easy group communication. And you should be able to share a wave with any other wave address. That’s why we introduce federation between network accounts and public accounts.

Can I federate with any Peers.me domain? Yes you can. Just contact us to arrange the connection. Remember, you’ll have to get permission by the administrator of the other domain.

Can I federate with the personal network (as described above)? Yes, but contact us to arrange the connection.

How do I share a wave with someone on my federated network? Start a wave, enter the complete wave address of the participant (eg. john@company.peers.me). Make sure the domain is federated with your domain. You can check this at your admin page.

Other additions Search bar

You can filter your inbox by entering multiple tags or words in the search bar. To filter your inbox even easier, we’ve placed the used tags in the search bar. Just click the ones you would like to delete, or enter some new ones at the end.

Minor UI changes

User- and group lists have been polished.
The inbox will show waves which are new or updated by line of color; green for new, blue for updated.

Update; Sign in methods

August 4, 2011 by Daniël

We have some nice features in this update:

Sign in/up methods
Invitation reminder
Save as filter
Suggest wave address
Updated language packs: Française & Español

Sign in /up with Google, Twitter, Facebook or OpenID

From now on you can sign in with your Google, Twitter, Facebook or OpenID account. Just enable the option at your settings page. As an admin you can enable or disable every external authentication method as you please. New users can sign up with these providers, speeding up the registration process!

Select your favorite methods (above) and login (below)

Invitation reminder

To help you get your users online, we’re reminding every user who hasn’t responded to your invite three times. You, as an admin, won’t have to do anything, in the invitation overview you can see if and when a user has been reminded. If a user doesn’t want to be reminded again, or doesn’t want to signup to your network, they can simply reject the invitation.

Save as filter

If you regularly use the same hashtags to filter your inbox you’ll be happy now. You can now save the filter and can access is with a single click via the inbox menu. Just use some hashtags, “with:[waveaddress]” or words to build the filter, click save filter and give it a nice name.

Let us suggests a Wave address for your users

To speed up the signup procedure, we’re suggesting a wave address for your users. The suggestions are based on the first and last name and the emailaddress of the user. If they signed up using an external provider like Facebook, we’ll suggest the Facebook nickname as well!

Updated language packs: Française & Español

As promised, we’ve updated our language packs for our French and Spanish speaking users. Please let us know if we did a good Google Translate job

Next up

We’re in the final development and testing stage of real-time collaborative wave editing, so we will release this feature very soon! With this feature you can edit a wave with multiple users at the same time. With this feature you can also fully use the wave permission levels full-access, commenter and read-only.

July update

July 14, 2011 by Daniël

This week we’ve updated Peers.me with the following:

Contact list
Markup for waves with Markdown
Permissions for waves
Inbox preview pull down
Star your waves
“Archive all”-button
Update marker on waves
Secure connection

Contact list To give users a more personal interface, we’ve introduced a contact list. This contact list doesn’t include all users and groups, but users or groups you’ve had a conversation with, your fellow group members and your groups. Favorite contacts can be starred for easy access. We’ve dropped the groups and users overview with the introduction of the contact list.

Markup We’re introducing Markdown for writing waves. This means you can now create texts including bold, italic and more. Just type in a word like this to make it bold. Italic, can be done with underscores. Its even possible to place headers (H1), lists and quotes in your waves. Also nice to know is that you can now enter as many links, attachments or embeddings on one line as you want! To get to know all these possibilties, start a wave and click the “markup” button.

Wave permissions By default a participant has full access on a wave, which means this participant can edit all content, add replies, add and remove other participants and publish and unpublish waves. But sometimes you want to add a participant without all these permissions. It’s now possible to set participant specific permissions for waves. Next to full access, we’ve added the commenter and read-only permissions. A participant with commenter permissions can only add new replies to a wave and edit these replies. A read-only participant can only read the wave and nothing else. Full access participants can set and change the permissions of all participants. Of course every participant can remove itself from the wave.

Inbox preview While typing your waves, you may notice you’ve got unread waves (seen by the number after “Inbox”). Normally you would have to save your work and navigate to your inbox to just see who and what is being shared with you. From now on you can directly see such information in the inbox preview pulldown. Simply click the Inbox button and the pulldown will appear. Click a wave to navigate directly to the it. Click inbox to navigate to your inbox.

Star your waves

Some waves may be important to you. Maybe because you’re waiting for an answer or you’ll just want to mark them for something else. We’ve added the possibility to star your waves and easily filter them from your inboxes. Click the star icon on top of the wave or at the wave in the inbox and their starred. Easy as that.

Archive all Sometimes, after your long vacation, you have some unread waves in some groups. Maybe they’re not that important, but to archive them, you’ll have to do that one-by-one. Say goodbye to manually archiving. At the top bar is now a “archive all” button. This means the waves your seeing can be archived with one click. So if your filtering your waves on a hashtag #design and as participant with:martin, you can now archive all waves with Martin and #design in one click. Or navigate to a group inbox and click archive all to archive those waves.

Update markers It sometimes can be hard to recognize those messages in a wave which are new or updated. You can only recognize it by the date and time. From now on, new or updated messages are recognizable by two colors: green for new, blue for updated.

Secure connection Since today we’ve got an SSL certificate. Login at your domain at https:// instead of http:// (you will be redirected). You can check the ceritificate by clicking on its icon (or other green area). An popup like this will be displayed:

Next up Next up is realtime collaborative wave editing!

Invite on wave by email

June 1, 2011 by Daniël

We’ve updated Peers.me with some new features.

Invite on wave by email Sometimes you realize you’re creating a wave and would like to share it with someone who hasn’t got an account at your Peers.me yet. Normally you would have to save your wave and navigate to a group to invite the new user. Then you have to wait untill he activated his account and share the wave with him. Yes, that could take some time.

From today we introduce the possibility to invite a new user directly on the wave by email. Just fill in the email address and click on ‘invite by email’. The new user will be invited after admin approval. After signup, the new user automatically has the wave in his inbox.

Request account To collect a list of users who need to be invited to your Peers.me has become easier. Just point them to your login page and tell them to click the link ‘Don’t have an account? Request one here!’. After they fill in the form, the admin will be notified of the request and can invite them with one click. To allow account requests or not is configurable at the admin configuration page.

Auto accept invites and requests While inviting by email on a wave makes it easier for users who would like to invite others, the admin still has to accept the invitations. To make this easier we’ve come up with auto accept settings for group and wave email invites and account requests. Just enter the number of maximum auto accepts or just don’t set it at all to accept everything. Don’t want to auto accept anything, set it on 0.

You can find these settings at the configuration page (admin only).

Administrator notifications No more long waiting times for users for an admin to approve their actions, we will notify them right away! When there are pending administrator actions, like approving wave email invites or account requests, an alert shield appears next to the admin menu button. Clicking this will provide an overview of pending actions. Moreover, we will sent the admin a weekly email with the pending administrative actions.

Personal accounts

May 17, 2011 by Daniël

Personal account pre registration is now open!

Since our Public Beta launch in April we’ve received hundreds of registrations for Peers.me. A lot of these registrations were for teams, organisations or companies. But some of there registrations are likely meant for personal use.

While the Peers.me is great for communicating, a network account with just one user is useless, untill we introduce federation (in the nearby future). But we can imagine there’s a demand for personal accounts. A personal account will give you the possibility to wave with groups and users within the Peers.me Federated Network.

Since we first have to introduce federation for making Peers.me personal, we’ve changed our registration a bit. If you want to build a network of groups and users, create a network account. If you would like to have just an account for yourself, please pre register while we make this possible. We’ll contact you when we’re ready!

If you have any ideas about this personal account, let us know: Zendesk, Twitter or Facebook.

API & Public Beta

May 10, 2011 by Daniël

Hi!

We’ve activated publishing for all accounts! Publish a wave and share it with other sites and apps.

Share content with other sites From now on, every wave can be published by the participants with full access. The publications are made accessible via the Peers API, which makes it possible for a website (or other system) to show published waves and public profiles (users and groups). It is secured by an API username and password (take a look at the admin panel to get yours). (more…)

Peers.me federation

May 3, 2011 by richard

With the latest update the Peers.me domain is exposed in your wave address, eg. richard is now richard@company. These are the first steps towards federation between Peers.me domains.

What is federation? In may 2009 Google announced Google Wave, a service for online realtime collaboration. With the announcement, Google introduced the Wave Federation Protocol. This protocol is designed for realtime communication between servers. As of day one, we’ve been working on our own wave server to support group communication. We’ve always thought the federation protocol could be very useful for our clients. (more…)

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