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Less than a month ago I wrote about Opera integration with its own community site, so that it would be a great advantage for those of us members of the community. But I suspected nothing on how this idea can be scaled up to be related with the notion of an online operating system based on the browser and other "connected" applications. I was actually thinking small when I wrote that.

And this (rather outdated) post over here depicts a similar but scaled scenario, that would be great if Opera (the company) would dare to implement. The author talks about how he thinks an online (web-based) operating system might be, and I pretty much agree with him. Perhaps something like this is what Opera needs to become the real killer application that it should be. Opera is currently the best browser out there in terms of features, speed, accessibility, standards support, functionality, stability, security, etc. But it should be evident for most of us Opera supporters, that in the world of today, even all these is not enough. It doesn't generates the hype that could get this piece of software to the place it belongs to.

I have to admit though, that the most likely to develop something like this is Google and perhaps Yahoo. But Opera has to do something, because today is the aggregated value the one that matters the most, not the intrinsic real value. Take for instance the Google search engine. Google is not a search company anymore, they're more like an advertising company. The vision of "organizing the world's information" is just a facade. What does gtalk has to do with that? Now take Opera. The vision of being "the fastest browser on earth" is not enough. And the small (albeit loyal) user base that we are, will not maintain the company.

And going a little bit off topic now (but no so much). Today I've spent a little bit more time on the Internet than usual, perhaps because I've been out of it for most of the last two weeks, busy with the celebrations and all that. And I've been reading a lot of new things about the not-so-new concept of a web-based operating system. It seems that the arrival of the new year has awaken the dreams of many people claiming that, in spite of the exciting year that passed away, 2006 will be even more exiting in terms of web technologies, trends and all that. We are witnessing (live) the rebirth of a whole set of technologies with enormous social, cultural and political implications. The web is reshaping herself just in front of us.

Things like tagging, social software, folksonomy, standards, simple over complicated, small dedicated applications over one-app-fits-all-needs, feeds, communities, wisdom of the crowds, user-generated content, decentralization of web publishing, etc. All these and other stuff are becoming more and more an integral part of our daily experience and interaction with what started up being just a markup language.