The tenor of conversation

So all the underwhelming new features in Opera 10 — Turbo, visual tabs, new skin — have been a cover for the big show -- Opera Unite, their “reinvention” of the web that turns the browser into a no hassle web server to share pictures, music, chat, anything.  Setting security concerns aside, it makes sense.  If we've got near server-class hardware on the desktop, and server-caliber net access, why not bypass the middleman (or person, or computer) and act as our own servers?  (N.B. Like Turbo and Opera Link, all roads lead to an opera.com account.)  Opera is framing it as using our existing computer resources to add to the robustness of the web.  

It's interesting to me that this is happening just as Google is introducing Wave, which in a very real way reinvents email using everything we've learned in the past 40 years or so (yes, email is that old) about communication online.  Instead of using mail servers to just shuffle messages around between computers, Wave turns each message into a sort of hub for all manner of communication and collaboration, like live chat, annotation, media sharing, etc.  The message, and all the rest of the associated content, seems to exist on a server somewhere, accessible webmail- or Google-apps style, although a desktop Wave client wouldn't be unimaginable.  Google's planning on making it an open protocol, which should ease adoption.  (If Opera's hunch is correct, maybe we'll all be our own Wave servers sooner or later.  In which case, IPv6 better hurry up.)

While Opera, on the other hand, has driven browser innovation in the past, that's usually been as a function of new features, not a whole new web paradigm.  If their widget library in comparison to Firefox's plugin community is any indication, I'm not certain they actually have the juice to make this happen.

I do not regret not calling this post “Something to sing about”

Feature feature

This is my Andy Rooney post for the year, where I complain about some newfangled technology.

Lots of folks have been chattering about the new iPod Shuffle, pointing out the great strides they've made applying Moore's law to DRM authentication chips.  What they haven't mentioned, at least not loudly enough for me to notice, was Apple's brilliant decision to leverage cooler-than-cool voice menu technology, apparently licensed at a discount from Visa Fraud Prevention Services.  “I believe you said Barry Manilow.  Is that correct?  Hold on, I'll connect you.”  Cutting edge stuff, there.  I'm not saying it's not useful, just that it's not an innovation (1st generation iPods had it) and, more to the point, it's kinda boring.

In other lame lock-in technology news, Opera, my favorite browser, is really losing my confidence.  Their two biggest recent features, Opera Link and Opera Turbo fall kinda short of the groundbreaking standard they set with mouse gestures, speed dial, the intellegent address bar, etc.  The former is a bright idea — a way to synchronize your browser preferences all over the web — that I'd probably like better as flexible, open format rather than as a razor for a My Opera account.  The latter idea was short-sighted when Google, AOL, and Netscape introduced it back in '04 or '05: a proxy server that will pre-fetch, compress, and prioritize web traffic to your browser.  It was a smart technology for Opera to apply to mobile devices, but adapting it for the desktop, where broadband speeds are (reluctantly but steadily) increasing, seems like a waste of resources that could be focused on real innovation.  Maybe useful for cellular broadband users?

They're making cool strides on the back end; Opera 10 will support web fonts, SVG fonts, cool opacity stuff... they already have a tech preview release of their next, next rendering engine.  Also, they've brought Jon Hicks in to work on the UI, which suggests it'll be more than just a re-skin.  The latest alpha preview just didn't whelm me, I guess.

It's like that scene in William Gibson's Count Zero, where they quantify the research output of a scientist, and extrapolate the graph of his future breakthroughs.  I'm projecting a plateau.