Convos is a recent Flex application that provides an easy way for people to manage groups and subscriptions. Like Google Groups, Convos allows users to create online groups with their own email address. Once logged in, users can easily see messages, to do items, calendar events, photos and more from each of the groups that they subscribe to.

I like the central spot for all group notifications - when you login you can easily see all the messages for all the groups that you belong to, same with the to do items, notes, photos etc... I also love the clear pricing scheme for users and groups - not to mention that the prices are more than reasonable. (I've blogged often about how I like using subscription based pricing rather than advertising supported sites.)

There are some things I don't like about it though. I don't like the getting started process once you've signed up - there's some improvements that could be made for new people getting used to the site. (For instance, the welcome email doesn't instruct you how to start your own group.) The UI for certain elements could be improved - for instance using a calendar to display events, or using a custom component (like Fisheye?) to display images and files.

Having said that, there are new updates being released every few weeks, so this is definitely a work in progress. For those of you looking for technical information, JP from the site emailed me and let me know that they're using Java on the backend, and running things on Amazon's EC 2 (they're also using S3 to store data.).

Convos is a good application today. If they can fix a few of the problems and improve the UI a bit, I think Convos could be great. Definitely one to keep an eye on.