What's the Bzzzz?
I was reviewing some end-of-year Top Tens from my various tech sources, and I was intrigued by two "promising technologies" for 2010: Opera Unite, and Google Wave.
What Opera tells us about Unite: "Opera Unite is a new technology platform allowing you to share content directly with friends without having to upload anything to a Web site. You can stream music, show photo galleries, share files and folders or even host your own Web pages directly from your browser."
In essence, when you run Opera on your computer, it has become a de facto web server, inserting you directly into the "fabric of the Internet."
Web servers are basically a computer equipped with the software necessary to deploy web content as requested by users: Opera Unite is that software. I have yet to try this out (I will, of course, and will report back to you!), but according to Slashdot, "While nginx, one of the fastest web servers available, is 5 times faster [than Unite], a PHP+Apache+MySQL server is only 2 times as fast. A compiled C++ server, the MadFish WebToolkit, is 6 times faster. He concludes that Opera Unite's server is impressive, and that the others come nowhere close to the ease of use."
The idea here being that you, the Average Joe/Jane, can serve up your own web content without an IT degree.
Google Wave, for which I have requested a "limited preview" invite, is described as a "personal communication and collaboration tool."
This technology also goes right to the heart of what I think will be the "big development" of the next few years: bypassing the existing learning curve that restricts the average person's ability to deploy web content.
A "wave" is described by Google as being equal parts email and document: while an email exists among those copied, and is at best a threaded discussion in some sort of chronological order, a wave is a multi-media document that can be appended at any time by any participant in the document, and at any point in the document - with essentially "any" content (that is to say, it can include video, music, and so on, as well as text).
Each wave can be played back, tracing the wave's development - who added what when.
It's all part of the "hive mind" mentality that has, bit by bit, become an increasingly dominant part of Internet knowledge sharing.
What Opera tells us about Unite: "Opera Unite is a new technology platform allowing you to share content directly with friends without having to upload anything to a Web site. You can stream music, show photo galleries, share files and folders or even host your own Web pages directly from your browser."
In essence, when you run Opera on your computer, it has become a de facto web server, inserting you directly into the "fabric of the Internet."
Web servers are basically a computer equipped with the software necessary to deploy web content as requested by users: Opera Unite is that software. I have yet to try this out (I will, of course, and will report back to you!), but according to Slashdot, "While nginx, one of the fastest web servers available, is 5 times faster [than Unite], a PHP+Apache+MySQL server is only 2 times as fast. A compiled C++ server, the MadFish WebToolkit, is 6 times faster. He concludes that Opera Unite's server is impressive, and that the others come nowhere close to the ease of use."
The idea here being that you, the Average Joe/Jane, can serve up your own web content without an IT degree.
Google Wave, for which I have requested a "limited preview" invite, is described as a "personal communication and collaboration tool."
This technology also goes right to the heart of what I think will be the "big development" of the next few years: bypassing the existing learning curve that restricts the average person's ability to deploy web content.
A "wave" is described by Google as being equal parts email and document: while an email exists among those copied, and is at best a threaded discussion in some sort of chronological order, a wave is a multi-media document that can be appended at any time by any participant in the document, and at any point in the document - with essentially "any" content (that is to say, it can include video, music, and so on, as well as text).
Each wave can be played back, tracing the wave's development - who added what when.
It's all part of the "hive mind" mentality that has, bit by bit, become an increasingly dominant part of Internet knowledge sharing.
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