Opera Unite

While waiting for the OS3 for the iPhone, V recommended I do a little research on a new project from Opera, Unite. If you've been reading this blog you know I'm quite a fan of Opera though lately they have been disappointing me.

What is Opera Unite?

Unite is a new concept. Actually, it's a question for an older concept.. " aren't we missing something? shouldn't this be different? " where this refers to the internet.
The internet may be viewed as " a series of tubes" but that's somewhat misleading. Fortunately the way the internet works is quite easy to understand and if you're reading this blog you already know how it works. The whole idea behind Unite is that why should we depend on servers who somebody else manages? why should we depend on 3rd parties when it comes to file sharing and other such interactions?

This idea in itself is worth pondering. And the people at opera say they have a solution, but I believe it to be flawed from the beginning. Their ideea is that each computer on the web should be it's own web-server, and interactions should be ..well .. directly peer-to-peer. And somehow Unite is said to deliver that. But my honest opinion is that Unite is an upgraded tunelling , VPN app. Something like next-gen Hamachi, over which you can now send files and stream media. But that's crap. The whole ideea with posting on the web is "it's there even if you're not". Social services are meant to be hosted by 3rd parties. Instant messaging is already well established with it's own apps. Same goes for browsing, games and everything else. Why would you want to downgrade all of the great apps and services out there and stick them all up in another new app? it just doesn't really make sense.

And let's say you do that, let's say it works out fine, but in the end ..YOU ARE STILL DEPENDANT ON 3RD PARTY SERVERS, opera's in this case.

SO let's try and forget for a second about utopic web-spaces and let's focus on rolling out the useful software..YOU HEAR ME APPLE??? useless people....