Opera recently released a small revolution: Opera Unite. In short it's a web server integrated into your web browser.

Thinking about it I realized this could be far cooler than everyone else though. Of course people soon realized that Unite is technically cool. But everybody (including Opera itself) only published and showed services that already existed and simply worked as every other web server, too.

The new idea

What nobody seemed to realize is that Unite is a fully customizable peer to peer architecture! With the help of the MyOpera username it's possible to connect to everyone you know!

Unite United = U2

The new service that I envision, that would unite (therefore Unite United) you with all your friends, would work like this:

You simply enter a list of MyOpera Usernames as your friends. As soon as the service starts it searches via the Unite URL what friends are online. For those friends that are online it authenticates itself. (This would work quite simply with a 3-way handshake with some random numbers and could work via HTTPS through the Unite proxy.)

From that moment on you have real-time connections to all of your friends. (One of the biggest technically difficulties for Google Wave.)

Now this service could be extendible with anything you like. Concurrent document editing, direct file sharing while chatting or even a distributed facebook clone. And all this without making everything you have public and not needing passwords to be save.

Problems

There is still no overview page at http://username.operaunite.com/ where one could see which devices are online. And there is no HTTPS support, what is big problem when authenticating other users.

Oh and the biggest problem is of course that the proxy totally SUCKS. I'm getting thrown out all the time...

Conclusions

I think social and interactive peer to peer services are the only possible future for Opera Unite. Most people close their browser when they are finished surfing. That's just the way they think about a browser.

The Unite service page doesn't show a single interesting new service until today. I think this shows that a traditional web server is simply nothing interesting any more...

Who wants to try?

I won't have time within the next months to try my ideas presented here. Therefore everything presented may be used at your will as long as you mention my name somewhere :)