Opera Unite beta launched

@WSmart: Here is your "auto pager" for Opera: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33656

Anyone thinking P2P is like Opera Unite plainly hasn't used it.

P2P has some similarities, certainly. It makes files available from your machine, for starters.

P2P is designed to spread the files around efficiently, by distributing it to (and from) multiple systems. In a good P2P system, you can have a situation where the original and only whole copy of a file is no longer on the network, but so long as all the various chunks are spread across the network you will still eventually be able to get them all and have the whole file. Very efficient and impressive.

Some P2P systems go further and allow you to set explicit access (or priority access) to files. But as other hosts may not be similarly secured - and may be configured to automatically share anyway - then you should never think of a P2P network as private, and indeed privacy on a P2P network simply reduces its utility by reducing potential sources for a file.
Sharing a file or files to just one person via P2P makes little sense - you may as well use ftp, http or scp instead.

Opera Unite is about sharing data with your friends. Most of the apps I've tried allow you to password protect them - just one password, no username, but as the data is only served whilst opera's running, that seems sufficient.

With P2P, if I wanted to share some photos my best method would be to zip them up, move the zip file to an appropriate folder, secure it (if necessary), and then advertise that via email/IM/phone call to those I want to share it with. Who, it should be noted, I must know have the P2P software installed and configured correctly.

Risky, complicated, silly.

With Opera Unite, I point the Photo Album application at the folder, set a password to make it more private, and then fire off a URL to my contacts via email/IM/phone. They use a standard web browser - any one will do - and the photos are served via a gallery as though they're any other web page.

When I'm done, I stop the Photo Gallery page (but other apps, such as file transfer or the fridge can continue) and I'm now done.

Opera Unite is basically that quick temporary website that you occasionally want so you can share something with friends in private - but can't quite be bothered to set up and make private.

(You can forego the password and share publically, but then you may as well use Dropbox/Flickr or whatever.)

Many techies, with shell accounts and ftp/http servers will probably wonder why they should bother, as they can already do this. But for the average computer user, I can see that Opera Unite could be quite useful.

It's not something you'd use every day. But it is something you'd use, and there's nothing else quite like it on the market at the moment.

Are these the same Wegies that gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize? Good grief! I guess if you drink enough alcohol and squint your eyes just right, it all looks good whether it's neo liberal fascism or neo conservative fascism(but, oh, their fighting, so clearly one side of the same policies must be right.). Anybody here know what boolean logic is? My way now or my way later; there's no choice involved, no freedom, no democracy, just a bunch of dirty old men drinking alcohol and corrupting the youth as fast as they can, them, and their bird brain wives. Purple party anyone? Small minded men and women rule the globe. No offense to the Wegies. It's the same throughout our Western Culture and beyond. Welcome to Jurasic Park.

I think Opera died with their developer who died of cancer several years ago. It was the best browser, when we were using Socket 7 CPU's. There's no vision, zero. Opera was the first of the modern browsers to have tabs, and auto pager is the new tabs,the new revolutionary browser feature-before Google did threaded tabs. But does Opera have autopage? Does Opera have Independently threaded tabs? We're not using 500mhz CPU's anymore. It's just a job.

Be real, be sober.

P2P softs eMule etc all do that already, all eMule users can talk to each other.

If Opera really need to turn heads how about put Turbo Server code in clients and if user is on broadband the nearest lowbandwidth users to could get pages compressed from these nearest/shortest hop peers.

What a strange page. Surely anyone working for the IT press in 2009 knows that Opera are Norwegian?

And why cast doubt over whether Unite works or not by saying Opera 'claim' it does? That's the kind of wording a journalist uses when a company 'claims' something is 30% faster or with reduce costs by a hefty amount, not the basic purpose of something.

You wouldn't say that BMW 'claim' to make cars - they evidently do.

Btw, the article says "...the firm claims it can turn any computer into a client/server for sharing documents and other media." Well, it's not just something they claim, it's a fact cuz i already tried it and works flawlessly.

... hire some new journalists. NORWAY != SWEDEN! f*cking do your homework.

I think you meant "Norwegian browser maker", so close yet so far