1. To the extent that someone may have a publicly resolvable domain name, I would agree that peering can take place without involving Opera as a central authority. That said, I would not expect the typical user of UNITE to avail themselves of that type of configuration. The default configuration of any service will typically remain untouched by most people once adoption moves outside of a core group of early adopters. If Opera had chosen a decentralized model for name resolution (something along the lines of Microsoft’s PNRP) instead of assuming the default role of global proxy, it would be natively hubless. While direct peering is technically possible, I still feel that in practice the model the overwhelming majority of UNITE users will adopt will be centralized resolution through Opera.

2. While Opera may be one of the most secure browsers on the market, I absolutely stand by my assertion that having someone connect directly to a system in your house exposes you to a significant level of risk. If a zero day exploit does appear, it could put every system with UNITE installed on it at risk. Even if fixes continue to be released by Opera in an incredibly responsive way, they don’t always get applied with quite the same urgency by end users. That presents the potential of having your system compromised (albeit indirectly and unintentionally) by someone that you trust. While I know some people may feel differently, this isn’t a risk I personally would want to take.

3. The advantages of open sourcing UNITE really deal with how it could be packaged for broader adoption. Parts could be integrated into Apache or other open sourced infrastructure. It could become an abstraction layer for accessing cloud based information stores. This could let you move files between different 3rd party services or even local storage transparently and mitigate the lock-in effect. I do understand that being open sourced isn’t a solution for anything in and of itself. But given that the scope of what UNITE wants to do is massive, open source may be the best way to make it happen - and happen in a time span where it still matters.

Thanks again for sharing your opinions with everyone on this blog. I appreciate you taking the time to respond in such detail. Hopefully this does a better job clearing up my thinking behind the post.

It is. If you router supports UPnP and you haver your own domain/DNS entry somewhere you don’t need the Opera servers for anything. Right now the Opera servers make easy the name resolution for your PC and the proxy is a last resort for those using NAT or without UPnP support.

“Security is light weight. Running a web server on a computer creates a much broader surface area for attack. Unlike sharing that takes place in a cloud computing model, outside people will be connecting directly to your computer and reading files directly off your hard drive. “

Not quite. Sure it creates a broader surface area, but the file access is sandboxed and the whole model is as secure as the widget subsystem. Besides, Unite is not meant to use as a replacement of a full fledged web server, the ad-hoc nature of the services it provides makes difficult to index it using a web bot, even when the basic security model implemented right now, so it will be pretty hard to locate\attack. All in all, Opera has the BEST security records of any browser maker, not only it dos not have any Open vulnerabilities, it also fixed any reported problem usually before it gets disclosed to the public (meaning between few days and a week). That’s quite impressive.

About the open-source tidbit, IMO is not necessary. Unite uses open standards, and that’s more important. Besides there is plenty of documentation in the developer section of their site, so anyone can start creating their own services right away.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Content no longer takes a linear path from creation to consumption - what we think of as the tradition media model. Instead, the hard lines that existed between publication and consumption have blurred, with everyone playing both roles simultaneous. The resulting flood of content has brought it own share of challenges. As you point out, it has also clearly had an impact on the commercial structure of traditional content based markets like the news industry.

This is an area I definitely plan on exploring here in more depth. I appreciate you taking the time to read this blog and share your thoughts.

-john

So when you blog (via any WordPress blog), Ping.fm can take your content and spread it around to 30 different sites, including Twitter, and the rest.

As these social sites have to be joined and subscribed/friended, this doesn’t take the Main Stream media “broadcast” model - because you have to give worth to get subscribers. But it does change the model substantially. (As if newspapers and magazines weren’t already seeing their model change…)

Where social aggregators have become more and more common place after the success of Friendfeed, it’s just a matter of time before they also become social syndicators so that all your content is available through the bulk of your social networks.

And these three probably are due for a review on as a subject of their own.

Paul Vella
Director,
Madrid Int’l Business Inc.
500 Fifth Ave, Ste 2740
NY NY

I think that we are dealing with more than simply a numbers based tipping point. I believe that HTML 5 will become the foundation of the next wave of web innovation. As it gains momentum, compatibility and execution speed will become key components of an adoption decision. Another factor in this will also be support for mobile browsing, and in this regard Safari is far and away the dominant browser.

I completely agree that too much energy has been spent over the last 10+ years making things Microsoft compatible. It’s well past time for standards based browsing to come to the fore…

And this is not too early. How much compromises did we have to make in the last 10 years to be IE compatible. So much development time has been wasted due to the poor Microsoft “standards”.

What will be the tipping point of combined Safari & Chrome market share?

Well said. Murdoch’s complaint is a misleading rant. He knows perfectly well that he could be off Google tomorrow. I for one am sick of the dishonesty everywhere. Yes, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, but do any of the big media execs really think that poisoning the public (or more likely the Congress) against Google will somehow benefit them? I tend to think maybe none, or perhaps very few, of the big publishing organizations will survive the next 10 years. I hope I’m wrong and that we see a lot of innovative thinking. However, watching other industries disappear is a foreboding precedent (remember the 5.25″ disk drive makers?).

Curt