The Hickensian

Today, Opera launched it’s jewel in the Opera 10 crown: Unite. Around 3 years in the making, this service and it’s APIs allow you to easily share content from your computer to the world at large or just a select group of friends. It’s an ad-hoc personal webserver where you just choose a service (Photos, Media, Files. etc) and tell it where that content is – Unite does the rest. Lawrence Eng’s post on labs.opera.com does a great job of explaining Unite further.

I was a little nervous that the marketing talk (“Reinvent the web”, “servers belonging to strangers”) would distract from what is a great fun service and idea. Fears were unfounded though, as a majority of people have embraced Unite for what it is, and love it.

If you haven’t tried it yet, head over to the labs and remember: like any service with an API, the real excitement is in waiting to see what people do with it…