It is fairly rare that a company claims to have re-invented the internet and the announcement has an element of truth, but Opera’s unveiling of Opera Unite had a certain inevitability about it yesterday, although no real technology barriers were broken. As a result the Norwegian browser company may have triggered a whole new genre of applications, and just as many copycats.
All it has done, really, is put a web server in a browser, which means that any copy of Opera on a laptop or PC can have a website hosted on it. We came across this concept first in about 2000, but the idea never caught on, for very good reasons. Back then you needed a hard wired IP address, and although we asked Opera how it got around DHCP issuing of IP addresses, it never quite got around to answering us ‘ suffice it to say, it has managed this, we presume by an Opera server in the cloud somewhere mapping real world IP addresses to PC names in the log in process.
There are lots of technical issues here. Just think about how Google is going to find a web site that keeps popping up at different IP addresses, and which switches itself off at nights. It will have to go via Opera Unite itself and may not want to bother. But Opera Unite is not about that, it’s about thinking outside of the box, and in this case the box is a web server box.
Opera tried to claim the high ground calling it not Web 2.0 but Web 5.0 in the presentation, clich’d and pointless as that was, there is a basis to say that this will spark a revolution, but it might not be the type of revolution that Opera had in mind.
What Opera has created is a way that multiple PCs can talk to one another, directly without going through a web server ‘ what does that gives us? Well the traffic is encrypted, so overnight there will be piracy and darknets. A darknet is a network which outsiders cannot find.
Who uses darknets? Well if the newspapers are to be believed Terrorists and Paedophiles. The only device that can potentially snoop on these interactions are routers, and routers never have the time to sniff all the packets that they pass on their way. So this is very, very private traffic which only deep packet inspection can unearth, and since that’s potentially on the verge of being made illegal in much of Europe, then this is the creation of very private networks which cannot be snooped. The revolution that Opera might spark may be a very real coup-type revolution ‘ if you see what we mean.
Of course Opera will have the technical wherewithal to be able to at least point the authorities at the right group of PCs if they wish to look into nefarious activities ‘ but general snooping will be tougher all round, and that might be a good thing for most of us.
And we’re not sure just how useful such networks are, especially given the fall and fall on the pricing of web storage ‘ in many cases, such as Google and MSN ‘ the odd GB of it is free.
But this IS a new platform, and it does have an immediacy about it, of simple Peer to Peer connectivity. And by thinking outside the web server Opera has come up with two key things, a development platform for companies to build their own applications, and 6 example applications that you can use today.
These are file sharing, the Fridge, a Media Player, a photo sharing application, the Lounge and a simple web server.
File sharing is just a way of swapping files between places. If the files are unprotected then Opera presumes you have the rights to move them around. Of course these files can be anything, and we presume by file sharing there is no attempt by Opera Unite to be sure that the file has a way of executing when it gets there. But how many times have you wanted to get your hands on a big video file and found yourself FTPing across the internet to a server and establishing FTP rights etc.. This will be more like a simple copy command between two PCs ‘ navigate the remote directory’s which you have access to, drag and drop to your own PC. Leave it to complete the task in the background. Done.
In fact all these applications are very similar at the PC level, but appear differently at the consumer level. The Fridge is the transfer of very small files which are shown as Post It notes on a graphical Fridge door. ‘Please buy some milk on the way home,’ type messages.
Today that task is carried out by a cellular text, a phone call which has to interrupt someone, an email or an IM, both PC based or handset based. But they are not quite the same. What if another member of a group (like a family) is about to go to the shops as well. With the right permissions they can either take down the Post it or file another one saying ‘Don’t bother, I have to go to the shop anyway, I’ll get milk.’
If you use a text, you’d have to share the instruction with a group, same for IM or email, and that’s unlikely (you don’t email your entire family when you want some milk), but in Opera Unite that message is available to all the people that have been given the password to the Fridge.
Taking this example further, the request for milk might trigger another family member saying ‘Mum, if you are going to the shops can you also get” or ‘tell me when so I can get a lift home.’ It becomes a permanent dialog between multiple people. An electronic notice board that comes up on the bottom of your PC whenever anyone files a message, like a presence notification. The Lounge is just a group IM service, which works in the same way, but Opera anticipates it being used to have conversations online.
The media player is all about having access to your tracks from another PC, or for an extended group (again family members are a good example) to have the same kind of access. So applications may begin appearing which put all the music from a household on a single server and play it from there through other devices in the home or outside it. Almost like private placeshifting. Opera Unite will also list other people using this feature and if they put their music up without a password, it can be accessed by anyone.
We’re not sure, but we think this is streamed and that files cannot easily be copied in this way. But then again Opera Unite already has a file sharing application, so only DRM protected music would be safe from copying in this type of environment anyway, but if it is a streamed service, DRMed tracks may still be playable. It also sounds quite a nice way of discovering music, peeking at collections that are open, listening in. We would imagine that playing a video on one PC and viewing it on another through an Opera Unite connected PC, will be one of the first applications that is written by developers on this platform.
The photo swapping service immediately attacks services like Kodak Gallery photo sharing applications, but remember these applications are mostly free and pay for themselves by being advertising portals for other Kodak services. Put your own photos on a PC, share them with family and friends and avoid annoying adverts from Kodak and never worry that someone at the Kodak hosting centre is looking at your snaps.
Opera went to a lot of trouble to demonstrate that Opera Unite will work with other web browsers, which it convinced us of. But of course it is one way traffic for those browsers, until they add the ability to operate as web servers as well.
In many ways this is really similar to products like GoToMyPc, with some additional elements which really are about picturing how best it can be used. It’s not GoToMyPC so much as GoTO the parts of MY PC I am happy sharing with you. And of course it’s on a browser which is distributed for free.
Right now there are only three levels of access control over the content ‘ open to everyone, password protected, open only to the owner, but Opera made it clear that there would be more levels available later, but said that right now those levels were as secure as say Widgets were, and put in a sandbox of their own, so no-one can get out and play with the rest of your computer.
The company also said that it would put all of this on phones, set tops, media players and other devices as soon as it could, but could not give dates of when this would be done.
This is perhaps the last essential step to the humble browser becoming a tool for creating personalized Social Networks, so this has the potential to build a following to rival something like Facebook. What else do we get on Facebook except a lot of email reminders that someone from our past wants to be a friend, even though we can’t stand them.
It has photo sharing, presence, and better control over who sees what. You can open one set of pics to one person, and another set to another, by different passwords. One of the worst things about Facebook is that you always have to be the same persons to ALL of your friends, when there are things you want to share with your closest friends that you would not want your granny or daughter to see.
So expect another application on Opera Unite to be a series of social network tools, not even just one social network ‘ and if Opera manages to get Unite to take off, it will have far reaching implications to how people share entertainment content and will shape the browser strategy of many Opera rivals over the coming year.