Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
From Norway comes another project that shares the same principles of Chrome OS and it’s probably an alternative or accessorial to that system.
Opera Unite simply turns your computer in a server. You still use it as a normal computer, but you can also
share all the datas you have on it with your friends and who you’re connected with.
This Article is related to Chrome OS: Revolutionary?
At Opera they say it is also a way to owning back our datas and our freedom of decision-making on a certain level.
Right now we have to rely on third party servers that host our materials or on third party services that host our contacts
and make the rules with “terms of service” (i.e. facebook, myspace, etc).
Our computers are only dumb terminals connected to other computers (meaning servers) owned by other people — such as large corporations —
who we depend upon to host our words, thoughts, and images. We depend on them to do it well and with our best interests at heart.
We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not
first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet.
Social networking is important, but who owns it — the online real estate and all the content we share on it?
How much control over our words, photos, and identities are we giving up by using someone else’s site for our personal information?
How dependent have we become?
I imagine that many of us would lose most of our personal contacts if our favorite Web mail services shut down without warning.
(&ellips;)
Opera Unite instead makes possible to make connections straight from our computer to another without a third player.
Instead of using an online service you could just use an application that runs on your computer and on your friend’s one.
Let’s see a practical exemple to fully understand how it could work.
There is an application available right now (that you may not know but it’s clever so go check it if you’re interested) called
Simplify. You install it, create an account and after that you pick which folders you want to share online and you open
your favourite music player. If you have some friends running that application and you connect to their account you can then listen
to whatever track they have shared and they can do the same with you (cool as hell, I tried and I really like it).
So basically it’s like you have at your disposal all those gigabytes of music, even if they actually are stored on your friend’s terminal.
Unite promise to do something like that (they also have a media player like Simplify but more lame) with the plus side to extend
that to a huge number of possibilities as many application will be developed and will run on every operative systems where
already runs Opera.
I have to admit that even if I love the project I’m a bit less excited by the fact that it really reminds me of old
peer to peer networks. It’s obviously great that they are applying the concept to every kind of application, but the
idea is not that new.
So we understand that the future is to be completely online, but Unite is taking a stand and a different direction from the
current trends.
Chrome OS tries to project all our work online making it accessible from everywhere and to try to keep computers fast and clean.
By that philosophy the logic association that comes to mind is cloud computing, with all our datas stored somewhere and the
result of make them always accessible as well.
Opera Unite instead wants you to own back the power over your informations and online identities making the individual user the only player.
Two different approaches to a near future. What would you prefer?
In your opinions what are pros and cons?
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