Tech Answer Blog

The new Opera Unite platform provides a web server through the web browser.  The promise of this app is to provide services that negate the need for a single server in order to connect multiple people, i.e. collaborative spreadsheets or updating applications similar to Facebook, etc.

Assume for a moment that there were an open-source Facebook-like application available on the Opera Unite platform.  Since the application was open-source, and since it has no centralized system, it wouldn’t need to have any advertisements ever (no ongoing infrastructure costs to support).  If users have the choice between two similar services, and one of them doesn’t exploit their content for profit, would users ever not pick that one?

Thus, I believe that the Opera Unite platform or something similar may give rise to serious open-source web competition to commercial websites, particularly commercial social networking or collaboration sites (Flickr, Facebook, Google Docs, etc.)