Re: [BLUG] opera unite

Thanks for the good info.  It's always easy to get carried away with hype.  People are developing new ways to connect people to share information, be it personal photos, videos, business info, what have you, but the technologies that, at least to me, seem the most promising or exciting are those that are more open.  That's the one big gripe I have about the iphone.  I have an ipod touch, not an iphone, and it's a sweet little piece of hardware with some really creative apps.  I unlocked my touch, but it was far from easy and Apple is far, far from encouraging people to experiment with their system in wasy contrary to theirs.  Plus I hate iTunes.  Big, bloated, yucky piece of software I'm supposed to use to 'sync' it with my computer.  But I digress. . . .

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 2:37 AM, Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 01:11:41AM +0900, Ben Shewmaker wrote:
> There seems to be some excitement over the new Opera Unite. Haven't
> tried it yet myself, wondering if anybody else has played with it?
> Looks cool anyways. .

It looks pretty crappy once you realize how it works.

* http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/17/opera-unite
* http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/06/16/thoughts-on-opera-unite/

You get a super-crappy URL (which I consider a nonissue for most), and
all your content is fed through Opera's centralized Unite proxies (big
issue when the whole point of the thing is supposed to go decentralized
-- it isn't at *all* decentralized). As an added bonus, they reserve
the right to block and/all content as they see fit, and redirect pages
to other pages. They're not freeing things for the people, they're just
asking to be our new masters.

All the excitement appears to just be folks regirgitating Opera's press
releases.


I think it is much more exciting to know that Google's Wave application
has a public protocol site ( http://www.waveprotocol.org/ ) and that
their goals for it are broader than simply another Google App.

As simply another Google App it falls in to the "ultimately lame due to
proprietary nature". Things get a whole lot different if there are open
protocols, and random folks can have their own Wave servers. (Things
are best if said wave servers are open-source, but with open protocols
things can be rewritten.)

Cheers,

--
Steven Black <blacks@indiana.edu> / KeyID: 8596FA8E
Fingerprint: 108C 089C EFA4 832C BF07  78C2 DE71 5433 8596 FA8E


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