The Opera browser team has been playing the old, “market the mystery feature to generate buzz” game for the past few weeks, claiming that they will “Reinvent the Web”. Today they took the covers off their much touted mystery-thingamabob and announced Opera Unite. Unite is, in a nutshell, a web server embedded inside the Opera web browser. What’s this mean in laymen’s terms? It means when you’re running Opera, your computer can share files (and other webby stuff) sorta like Flickr and YouTube, but without the hassle of having to create Flickr/YouTube accounts, or having to upload said files. Want to share a video? Just run Opera and Unite will provide a URL you can share with your buddies. You can think of Unite services as little mini-websites that you host on your computer. The idea being that you can eliminate the hassle of dealing with middleman websites like, oh, Google Docs, for example.
That’s the promise. Opera is definitely playing up the “get out from under the evil server overlords” angle and flogging all the [supposed] benefits of hosting your content yourself. Unfortunately this seems to be backfiring a bit since you can’t actually use Unite due to Opera’s account creation system being broken (for this morning at least). So, can I get a Fail Whale, please?
(Thank you)
The problem is that there are very good reasons Google, YouTube, Twitter et al use a centralized architecture instead of a P2P system like Unite: Hosting content is a pain in the a** and it’s not something you or I, or any other user, wants to deal with. Being able to send your mom a URL to that photo album on your hard drive is all well and good – “hey, no need to upload it, right?” – until your Mom calls at 6am on Saturday asking why she can’t view it and you, in your bleary-eyed stupor, realize that you turned your computer off before leaving town for the week. Can you imagine Flickr support saying, “Urr… sorry, those pictures won’t be available until Monday when we get back to our desks.”
It gets worse. Imagine downloading a viral video to your desktop and sharing it with a few friends, who then share it with a few of their friends and so on. Unite is not BitTorrent where responsibility for providing a file is shared among everyone who has a copy of that file. That URL points to your desktop so you are responsible for the bandwidth needed for all those people to pull a copy off your hard drive. If your ISP happens to impose bandwidth caps (like Bend Broadband does), your bill at the end of a month is gonna be one helluva shocker. Unless of course you happen to figure out why your network connection is so doggone slow and put a stop to things. Oh, right, you went away for the week. Never mind.
At some point, I’m sure we’ll hear Opera touting the benefits of this technology in the workplace. “Unite, the ultimate collaboration platform, yadda yadda”. But for IT departments and project managers, the prospect of having important project and company documents spread hither and yon across the various laptops and desktops around the company is a migraine-inducing show-stopper.
Unite isn’t a total lost cause however. There are certain cases where it’s probably useful and makes sense. The idea of hosting ad-hock chat rooms is interesting, but I don’t really see how it’s any better than Skype, AIM, Meebo, or the countless other web services available for that. But it’s a good example of how Unite isn’t just about sharing files. It’s a P2P platform that Opera has opened up for 3rd party development. So there may be some interesting and even useful applications developed for it. Time will tell, but I ain’t holding my breath.
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