Webware

Inside Opera Unite--screenshots

On Tuesday, Opera Software introduced a technical preview of Opera Unite, a component of its Opera 10 browser. Earlier this morning, I sat in on a Webcast where Opera's Chief Development Officer, Christen Krogh, ran through a demo and answered questions. Opera Unite, which uses your Opera ID to log in, is a Web server housed within the Opera browser. With it, you'll be able to host a Web site, and share files, music, video, notes, and chats with others.

The sharing process begins when you select the hard drive where your files are stored, and then select the individual files you'd like to share. You'll then set your sharing preferences--either public, private, or password-protected--and Opera Unite will create a direct URL, which you can share with others. Guests can view the content from any browser, not just Opera's.

Opera Unite doesn't yet extend to mobile phones and other Opera-powered browsers, but that will eventually be part of the plan.

Security has been a concern so far. Opera Unite is as secure as Opera Widgets, Krogh said. It features native apps running in a sandbox on top of Opera's Web browser, and using local storage. CNET's sister site ZDNet UK explores the security of Opera Unite in an article.

When you load Opera 10 with Unite, you'll enable Opera Unite it by clicking this icon.

(Credit: CNET)

Opera Unite shares similarities with the now-defunct AllPeers, an add-on for Mozilla's Firefox browser. While Mozilla hasn't announced intentions to build a similar sharing or hosting service, it is offering developers a chance to create more robust code packages using Mozilla Jetpack, a recent Labs project.

The technical preview version of Opera 10 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You should consider the software experimental; you may encounter bugs or other imperfections while using it. To see more detail about how it works, peer inside via our gallery of screenshots.

Open beta versions of Opera 10 browser that do not have Unite installed are available for Linux, Mac and Windows.

AllPeers, one of the 30 Webware 100 finalists in the Search & Reference category, is dead.

According to the company blog, the peer-to-peer file transfer service never got the user growth it needed to keep its investors happy. We covered the service a few times and gave it mixed reviews. I always thought it was an important product, but not a great one. It was a Webware 100 winner in 2007 and we made it a Webware 100 finalist again for 2008. However, early returns on AllPeers are not promising for this year: It has less than 1 percent of the vote in its category. (Part of that was our fault: It was somewhat misplaced in the Search group.)

We are removing AllPeers from the 2008 Webware 100, and this leaves us with 29 products in the Search & Reference category. We could leave it at that, but having only 29 products in this category offends my sense of order and symmetry, so I want to add another product to the polls while there's still time for it to make a fair showing in the voting. I could pick a product from our database of nominees, but I think I'll open this up to users instead. So, in the Search & Reference category, which product do you think should be added to the list of finalists? If the product you like is already a finalist (see list), please don't enter it here--vote for it instead.

I'm going to leave this write-in campaign up for just 24 hours--I will close it at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, March 4. So if you feel there's a Search product missing from the Webware 100, now's the time to make yourself heard. I want to be clear that this is not the vote. While I will strongly consider the number of nominees a write-in gets, ultimately I will pick what I feel is the most important product to be added to the polls. And once I do that, it will have to earn real votes like all the other finalists.

Update: The poll is closed. Based on the submissions (many of which were not for actual Search & Reference products), I picked Retrevo to replace AllPeers in the Search & Reference category. It will be added to the polling engine shortly.

Kevin Rose, of Digg and Revision 3 fame, just launched an invite-only alpha of his latest project, Pownce. Pownce lets you share files, links, and other info with your friends. It's not an original concept. Yet Pownce makes an extremely good first impression. (Earlier, we had invites to give out--but we're sorry, they're all gone now.)

Pownce's useful and fun desktop app.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Pownce strongly reminds me of Tubes (review) and Izimi (review), and little less so of AllPeers (stories) and Pando (quick hit). It's also reminiscent of the file-transfer feature of various instant-messaging clients.

There's also a heavy dose of Twitter (stories) in Pownce. Every time you send a file or note, it's added to your running feed of activities that anyone can view; likewise, it's easy to see the public feeds of other users and the private items posted by your friends.

You can send items to individuals on your list, to everyone, or to groups you set up (for example, you can have a family group, a group for a project at work, and so on).

At the moment, Pownce lets you send plain text notes, URLs, files, and event invitations (and it tracks RSVPs). I would not be surprised to see audio or video recording functions built into the product, which would make Pownce an interesting alternative to Twittergram.

Pownce works through a Web page, and there's also a slick Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo) desktop app.

It's easy to discount Pownce as a me-too concept. In fact, it's several. But it's extremely well put-together--capable yet easy to get into and use. And useful. And fun. Try it if you can.

... Read more

AllPeers, the social file-swapping and file-sharing Firefox extension is adding a built-in BitTorrent client early next month. Users will be able to download torrent files right in their browser without the need for a BitTorrent software client. Similar functionality was introduced to Opera's browser in mid-2005, however the team behind AllPeers is giving users an added bonus to download torrents through their extension. If two or more AllPeers friends are downloading the same torrent, they'll get the benefit of faster sharing. The AllPeers team claims it's double the speed they'd be able to get through regular peer-to-peer BitTorrent connections. AllPeers users will also be able to share the file in whole once the BitTorrent download has finished

AllPeers is one of the winners of the Webware 100 Awards and currently has more than 370,000 installations. The team estimates that about 53,000 of those users are active, and that the service gets a new user every two minutes. The new build with the built-in BitTorrent client will be available July 10.

See also: FireTorrent and FoxTorrent.

Users will be able to download BitTorrent files right in their browser without the need for a separate client.

(Credit: bugzilla.allpeers.com)