
Opera United is out! I didn’t stay up till 3:00 AM EST, but first thing this morning I did check out what it was all about, and I watched the brief video explaining what the fuzz & buzz was all about: File Sharing, Photo Sharing, Fridge (think of Facebook’s Wall), Lounge (chat). Media Player as in “Access your completer home music library from wherever you are” and Web Server, WOW!
I have not yet downloaded, installed and played around with Opera Unite; but if Opera can deliver on these promises from a Technological point of view it it will be real game changer for browsers, I am sure that the folks in Remond and Mountain View are frantically playing around with the software and taking notes (are they?), and such a functionality is surely beyond the capabilities of plug-ins in Firefox.
Of course building something doesn’t mean that “they” will come, at least not en masse. While FaceBook has stolen the lunch (and dinner) from MySpace as the 799.99 Lbs Orangutan, Opera Unite will surely find its place in nitches where tribal members want to share and interact with other members but need to be a bit more private then what FaceBook offers. Not only Opera Unite promises to offer ad-hoc and permission based sharing, but it also promises remote access to individual computing environment, I can just hear the new buzzword being “Personal Cloud Computing” (1,340 results in Google as of this writing).
Best of luck to the people at Opera, excellent strategy in trying to disrupt the Browser Wars by changing the meaning of “Web Browser“, Wikipedia people, are you updating . . . yet? Will Opera’s file sharing feature be a target of the Music Industry 1.0 like Michael Robertson’s MP3Tunes? Let’s all stay tuned, and let’s all give Opera a chance by downloading, installing and give Opera Unite a chance to free us from Web Servers.
P.S.: If Opera United adds real-time collaboration tools, it will compete directly with Google Wave!
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{Photography by }

“Should I create a group or launch a Page?” It’s the eternal question that gets asked as often as, “What is Twitter (Twitter reviews)?” at introductory social media training classes. Ever since Facebook (Facebook reviews) launched their Pages product as part of their larger advertising strategy (along with the ill-fated Beacon) in November 2007, there has been confusion over which to use. Because Groups and Pages have an overlapping feature set, even senior social media marketing consultants are sometimes stumped as to what to tell their clients. And Facebook continues to make changes to how Pages function, complicating the matter even further. (Read more at: Mashable.com)
RELATED LINKS:
- HOW TO: Set Up a Winning Facebook Fan Page (Mashable);
- HOW TO: Manage a Facebook Group (Mashable);
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{Photography by Jelene}





