Opera Unite – A Web Revolution?

If there’s one phrase that we have heard far too much of over the last few months (apart from credit crunch) it’s ‘revolutionising the web’. Numerous companies, most notable Google with their Wave, claim that their ideas will change the way we think about the internet, and what we do on it.

And so Opera (with 15 years of ‘browser innovation’ behind them, including having the impressive Opera Mobile 9.5) have released their plan, and it comes in the shape of Unite which essentially turns any computer running Opera – admittedly not many at the moment – into a web server. Although this may sound simple or even irrelevant it could well spell the future for internet browsing.

So what will being ‘a web server’ really mean? Well there are two ways of describing this: the first is the one that Opera chooses, explaining how computers would cease to ‘use’ the web, but would become a part of the fabric of the internet utilising quick internet and hardware speeds to truly communicate directly to others.

The mildly more technical way of showing the capabilities is as such: currently the internet works by computers accessing data from servers which although means you can have ‘personal’ pages (on social networking sites for example) you are really just using someone else’s ‘online real estate’.

However by being able to use your own computer, via a browser, as a web server you will be able to do so much more, and that is what Opera’s Unite is offering. You will no longer be bound by other server’s restraints, terms and conditions and many of the other problems that servers raise.

But what are the real advantages? Well admittedly this is where the whole idea kind of falls down. Although Opera has real potential the number of services currently available are neither revolutionary nor particularly numerous.

Obviously the main reason behind this is that Unite is currently only in the Alpha phase, and will rely heavily on developers to come up with cool applications and tools that can utilise what this new system offers in a way that will attract more people and generally make communicating with people easier.

The main application that Opera have shown us at the moment (along with the self explanatory ‘basic web server’ [for hosting sites on our PC], ‘notes’ and ‘photo sharing’ apps) is the Jukebox, and although I will go more into depth with this later on this week, the basic idea is that you will be able to add music to a jukebox along with friends and then random tracks will then be streamed from your computer to everybody else’s.

As I said before this is not especially revolutionary (there are third party apps out there that will allow you to do the same thing by running it through a server) and the fact that practically no-one uses Opera is a big problem, but the idea behind it ismost certainly revolutionary, as are the new possibilities that it will allow.

Despite all this is would be unfair to judge it before we have had time to have a good play with it, but (and yes, I may just be a little too excited by the whole idea) I think this may well be the answer that the question that the web has been asking for a while now: “What next?” This could well revolutionise the web.

Via – Opera Labs

Related Pages:

1. Opera Unite Jukebox
2. Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta – Free Download!
3. Opera 10 Review (Internet Browser)
4. Facebook In Real Life?
5. Monster Hunter Freedom Unite Review (PSP)

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