For the clients, it should work fine, as idiot says it makes changing things easier, as you can just add fields, or deprecat others and the clients will continue to work until they decide to use the new features.
Depending on what you are sending between nodes, it might be a bit too much overhead.
If it is a shared cache type thing, could you not use something like Mnesia or Riak? Or if you need to send actual messages maybe just simple JSON, or protobuff/cap’n proto if you want smaller.
