Web Opera 2.0

It all started Here...

A tiny bit of hearsay from the depths of the interweb. Showing what has become our collective unconscious six degrees of unaccountable separation. It starts like this:

"Evidently there's a guy who knows a guy, who knows people at the Opera web-browser company. You know, the one currently raising a stink over their new open source and mobile browser offerings? Do ya know what "Web 2.0" company leader is going to buy them?"

Every tech blog worth its salt has been dog-piling on this idea this past week (Even Opera has no idea where the rumor came from). With buyouts slated from Google, to Yahoo, to Microsoft. The reasons varying from moving into the mobile market to things that sounds like a benevolent Cobra Commander's plans.

With Firefox recently moving into the double-digit percentage of browser users, and IE pissing users off daily. A nifty little browser, especially one that can be used on cell phones/pda's/the shitter could be hot commodity. If you're a Web based company, and planning on moving into this weird future of running applications virtually from a browser. Then this purchase looks even better. But why is there so much speculation and geeks creaming themselves over this?

Something that sounds faintly dangerous and mildly speculative, The I-Bubble. What I think this whole "Web 2.0" nonsense really is.

The I-Bubble is the huge amount of information being spewed forth by Bloggers, I-podders, v-casters, whoever. You could even take it down to the MySpace level if you wanted. The I-Bubble is similar to the Web-Bubble build-up in that it's getting a very long tail that could threaten to break off. Except this time the financial loss could possibly become a substancial gain due to the technologies brought out of it. But I'm beginning to digress. The I-Bubble is what’s driving this Opera story.

Opera since it went freeware has placed itself in the running for a cheap, well made cross platform browser. With its micro applications it gets even better because you can surf on your phone, go home and move that info into its big brother. If you're using web-based applets as envisioned the web moving towards (Web 2.0) it would be nice to have a platform like this soon. Or kill it while you can. Now I see this, many other Bloggers out there do as well. All it takes is one overzealous techie to make a little comment and we could all get in a tizzie just speculating on the implications. Really that's what I think this is all about. Someone heard a rumor and it spread. E-mails, Forums, Myspace, blogs, pod-casts. The Media Jungle is getting diverse and the food chain is getting complex. The I-Bubble is getting bigger and this is the result.

I'm sure that Dan in the IT department at Microsoft did hear Mr. Gates correctly say Opera was a threat and that it should be dealt with. Is it though? Not until they're actually losing money.

I'm sure there was a company memo at Google saying that movement into a browser platform for itself would be the logical next step. Then the big guys up front figured that if they wanted to do that, paying the Mozilla guys to develop one would be cheaper than buying Opera.

And Yahoo? Well someone had to feel sorry for them for being the Roundy’s of Web services.

The truth is there is a lot of information out there, its like fractals spinning out of control. The I-bubble is just giving us the platform to do that on.