Opera Unite

Today Opera unveiled Opera Unite - the premise:

 

Opera Unite is a unique technology that turns any computer or device running Opera into a Web server. In other words, your computer (running Opera Unite) is truly part of the fabric of the Web, rather than just interacting with it, and it’s something anyone can use. With Opera Unite, everyday non-technical users can serve and share content and services directly from their own computers in the form of intuitive applications. 

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This technology is a radical first step towards addressing what I call “the Internet’s unfulfilled promise”, which is about our ability to connect with each other and participate meaningfully online—on our own terms, and without losing control of our data.

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However, “the wisdom of the crowd,” along with the notion that our data ought to live on other people’s computers that we don’t control, has contributed to making the Internet more impersonal, anonymous, fragmented, and more about “the aggregate” than the individual. In fact, quite the opposite of the original promise. For too long, we’ve been going online to connect to each other, but sacrificing intimacy as a result.

With Opera Unite, I think we can start moving in a different direction. I hope you’ll join me in imagining a more personal and social computing experience that actually begins to deliver on the old (but not forgotten) promise of the Internet bringing people together in meaningful ways.

The positioning of the product – as a reinvention of the web, the web browser as a web server, as a rethink of the client server model – is interesting, although DHT/P2P based models have been doing similar stuff for a long time. Firefox has a POW extension, and Tonido has been working on a similar, decentralised model.

Comments

[Michael]

Getting POW to serve is a port nightmare. Why not just set up apache? In fact, it's easier. Opera has solved the problem, with some annoying downsides from a technical point of view.