Opera Unite is a Hail Mary 260
snydeq writes "Rather than view it as a game-changer, Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees Opera Unite as a Hail Mary bid for Opera to stay in the game. After all, in an era when even vending machines have Web servers on them, a Web server on the Web browser isn't really that groundbreaking. What Opera is attempting is to 'reintermediate' the Internet — 'directly linking people's personal computers together' by making them sign up for an account on Opera's servers and ensuring all of their exchanges pass through Opera's servers first. 'That's an effective way to get around technical difficulties like NAT firewalls, but more important, it makes Opera the intermediary in your social interactions — not Facebook, not MySpace, but Opera,' McAllister writes. In other words, Opera hopes to use social networking as a Trojan horse to put traditional apps back in charge."
Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the UK, they begin capping your connections.
When ISPs start capping to the level of poor performance, I presume that Opera will use its already implemented BitTorrent implementation to keeps files downloaded by your friends distributed amongst them.
It seems Opera is well designed for this sort of thing. Imagine chatting over IRC with your firends using a build-in IRC daemon - with each friend being a split in the server. It's ingenius.
To what extent will Opera really intermediate? (Score:5, Interesting)
The main purpose to the servers that Unite can provide, is that they the most common type of computer connected to the Internet (one that does not have its own static IP, and cannot accept connections due to either a home router or a firewall) can act as servers. I've yet to find out much about the technical workings of Unite, but from what I can tell the main role Opera's servers perform is to allow the location of and the connection to a computer which would normally permit neither. Once a client has found and connected to a Unite user, does Opera still continue to act as an intermediary, in the same way a cloud service would?
SupraBrowser=Opera Unite+Google Wave (Score:5, Interesting)
I released an open source web browser called SupraBrowser [sourceforge.net] a while back. It has very similar characteristics to Opera Unite, in that it's designed to act as both a client and server at the same time (we called it a "servant") :).
This was more of a research project, as in fact, it was designed as a research and collaboration system for financial services companies and is currently used heavily by several very large financial services companies. It's almost like a combination of Google Wave and Opera Unite, in that it's based on a secure real-time messaging layer (xmpp/jabber wasn't stable or mature enough when we started....if we were doing it over today we might use jabber, but we also had the need for a lot of queuing and persistence that jabber wouldn't have provided), where all communication is completely encrypted using 3DES and a zero knowledge authentication. It supports email, mailing lists, group posting boards, link sharing, workflow, and a bunch of other really innovative features.
That said, I don't know how to manage an open source project and generate a community around our efforts other than posting to various blogs every once in a while when I see something related. Even still, its' frustrating because we actually went far down the road of trying to do kind of what Opera is doing, but without a middle man/trusted third party (hence the requirement for SRP Zero Knowledge auth). We want to build a personal cloud collaboration environment where data becomes user-centric and controlled, where other services federate from that single point of truth owned and controlled by the user.
Given that it's a research project, there are also some very innovative ideas, and I have yet to see anyone implement tagging better or provide a better way to manage personal information. I have over 25,000 bookmarks and files that are all full-text indexed (on Lucene), and tagged so that I can easily get back to stuff and correlate it within my existing cloud of data.
This I think is one of the real weak points of the open source model. If there is something very innovative, it generally requires sales and marketing to shove it down users' throats given their natural tendency to resist change. When the users are the developers are the users, the self selection process tends to restrict certain things. I can think of no other explanation for why releasing 4+ years of effort has been almost completely ignored. If someone can point out why the open source community has ignored SupraBrowser I would be all ears!
If anyone has any ideas or feedback, please reach out to me! suprasphere ____ @ ___ gmail.com
David
There are all kinds of uses (Score:4, Interesting)
The author may be right in the sense that Opera is attempting to find a way to distinguish their product from the competition, but I think he's missing a few points.
There are many reasons why you might want to run a personal web server on your local machine. It can act as a proxy for example. Since it is fairly easy to program it with scripting languages it can do a lot of interesting things. Granted all that functionality could be built into the browser itself, but if you can tap into a lot of existing code and also create a more organized stack for this kind of thing it could be useful. You could do most of the things people use things like Greasemonkey for now, except probably better.
It could be highly useful for web app developers. With some specialized tools designed to help with things like AJAX debugging it could represent a significant draw. This is maybe not a huge market for the bigger browsers, but if Opera can get a bit of penetration into the dev tools market this way it could provide them with a new revenue stream.
It could be highly useful for collaborative web based applications which feature interactivity. For example it makes more sense to send a copy of every event the UI needs to process to a queue on the client side than to force repetitive performance-destroying polling across the net. Now the app need merely check a local queue using a local HTTP request, probably using AJAX. It could also be used to allow processing resources at the clients to be harnessed to do a lot of the work, possibly in parallel.
This is not a new concept, but nobody has really rolled out a useful version of it before. There are going to be issues like NAT firewalls etc, but there are various ways to approach solving them. Afterall, people play online games all the time that require them to open ports, etc for bi-directional communications. All this is doing is extending that capability to the web.
Personally I don't think it will catch on simply because Opera has too small a market share to make it worth people writing a lot of software that depends on it, but the concept itself is not bad. Perhaps Mozilla will experiment with this too, then it might go somewhere, finally.
Re:sad but true (Score:5, Interesting)
Cloud = silver lining (Score:3, Interesting)
ensuring all of their exchanges pass through Opera's servers first. 'That's an effective way to get around technical difficulties like NAT firewalls,
Well, ever since broadband came in people could run home servers if they want - OS X comes with a built in web server and the world hasn't ended. Lots of NAS boxes today include click-and-drool webservers and you can get dynamic DNS if you don't have a fixed addresss.
However - I've got a better idea: why don't they just store the stuff the users want to share on the central servers? I mean, hard disc space is about fsck all per megabyte these days, the servers can run 24/7, have a super-fast connection to teh interweb (not an ADSL line with lousy upload speed) and have the latest security patches applied daily by dusky, nubile virgins (well, 1 out of 3 ain't bad). Even if the server does get hacked then it doesn't affect the end user. Much better than leaving your PC on all the time, or having someone suddenly trying to download a video when you're in the middle of a networked deathmatch...
Then there would be loads of material on the servers, so people would actually want to visit them. Hey, they could even attach comments and stuff to people's photos, videos, news articles and things to say whether they liked them.
You could call it MyCRT, FlipR, ArseBook or ColonPling or something...
Should I patent this, perhaps?
Re:Bad summary (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera's made a very good living on their Mobile version, but I think they're in major trouble there now, thanks to WebKit. WebKit is a very good browser core, and it's free and open source (plus, it doesn't hurt that it lets mobile phone makers imitate Safari on the iPhone, since they're all based on the same core).
Look at the players that have adopted WebKit-- Apple, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, and Google for Android. In two years, it's taken somewhere between 50%-60% of the mobile browser marketâ" about half of that appears to be iPhone/iPod Touch.
Opera's problem is that, even if a "new smartphone takes over," if it comes from Palm, Nokia, or runs Android, it's going to have a WebKit-based browser on it, not Opera.
Re:Not to mention security, bandwidth, etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bad summary (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera is the best desktop web browser and I'd hate to see it go.
But in the computer business, being the best has rarely if ever led to being a
commercial success. For that to happen, you need both a relatively free market,
and you need a population that is mostly able to judge quality. With computer
software, neither of these is true. Each vendor does their best to create a
"walled garden", so that their customers buy only through them. Part of the game
is to make it as difficult as possible to switch to the competition, typically
because you lose most or all of your data when you do so. And, of course, there's
Microsoft's approach of making exclusive contracts with retailers so that startups
can't even sell their stuff in retail outlets without MS's permission. Plus the
simple fact that it's hard for a small company to compete against others that can
run billion-dollar ad campaigns. Combine all this with a customer population that
is mostly utterly ignorant and just buys whatever is most advertised, and you have
a good idea of what the computer "market" is really like.
OTOH, it's not always necessary to be the market leader. Reports are that Opera
is financially a success, and this is also true for many other small companies that
make a good product and can sell it to people who understand and pay for quality.
If they don't do anything totally stupid, chances are that they can survive and
keep paying their people for a long time.
After all, our mammalian ancestors survived for a hundred million years in the
shadows of the big dinosaurs. Being the biggest isn't always a long-term survival
strategy. Hereabouts, there are several "farm stand" stores that are doing quite
well against the big supermarket chains, by selling quality produce to people who
want it and will pay for it (typically less than what the supermarkets charge for
inferior produce). Examples abound of the little guys prospering while the big
guys fight their dominance battles. Maybe Opera can continue to do the same.
Re: True, but... (Score:3, Interesting)