oponia networks

There’s a Hole in My Workflow: Frictionless File Exchange

vanessa — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 23:12:04 +0000

Wouldn’t you love to kiss email attachments goodbye? Or FTP? Or scp’ing something to a well-known directory for another developer (or script) to pick up? If so, read on for an alternative.

IM is great for synchronous conversation: when I need an answer quickly or when I’m solving a problem together with someone else not in the same room. Email is still the best medium we’ve got for asynchronous conversations or one-way notifications that tend to be more thoughtful, more information-dense, and which benefit from a persistent textual record. But difficulties with managing and retrieving email make it flawed, and this headache only increases when attachments are used frequently.

So how should I exchange larger documents and document sets: a presentation I need to review; collections of code source files and media assets being handed off by co-workers; confidential spreadsheets, architecture documents, and whitepapers?

Email might not even be appropriate for these things because a) they’re too big, b) they’re drafts or works-in-progress which evolve too frequently to manage effectively with email, or c) the list of recipients is large, or it’s indeterminate, or it may grow. And FTP… well, for someone like myself it’s just inconvenient, a break in the flow of my work. And what’s the format for those .htaccess files again? Rats! I can never remember that stuff…. For many others, it’s not really an option. Not unless they’re best chums with someone in the IT department.

This is where I eat my own dog-food every day: ucaster is great for taking the pain out of passing files around among a workgroup. It takes no time at all, doesn’t break the easy flow of my work, and takes all the pain out of password protection. A less obvious benefit is that everything I’m sharing stays within easy reach and visibility. There’s no inherent disorganization or fragmentation (nobody’s perfect, mind you.) All my shared files are nicely managed, searchable using Spotlight, included in my regular backups. etc.

I knew I needed this, but I didn’t know how much I needed it until I had it. Now move your mouse away from that “Attach” button.

Absolute Power?

alfons — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:07:54 +0000

The blogosphere is all a kurffle today about Google’s low privacy ranking. As quoted by Mathew Ingram’s post

“A non-profit group called Privacy International — one of the groups behind the Big Brother Awards — has released a report that puts Google at the very bottom of the pack when it comes to protecting the privacy of its users”

But isn’t that always the problem with absolute power? Don’t get me wrong - i have always been a big fan of Googles - but reports like that are why I think healthy competition and having alternatives are a great thing. Keeps everyone in check. And everyone needs to be in check, even Google

We Are The Network

leigh — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:51:49 +0000

So Vanessa starts talking to me about this idea of wanting the Web to be end-to-end. She was going on about nodes (huh?) and how I am not a node (wha?) and then she started to furiously draw a bunch of pictures where the Web was represented in all its glory as something that looked pretty much like this:

I loved her passion but I didn’t know wtf she was talking about. And after about a half an hour of her mad technical genius, I said, yeah but what does that mean?

V: It means you could publish stuff from your laptop without anyone in the middle.

And that’s where it started. Getting rid of the middle man and giving yourself a presence on the Web that was totally and completely your own. In many ways a simple idea, but once you wrap your head around the implications of it, an extraordinarily powerful one as well.

As for the product we created on top of the oponia networks platform?

One of the greatest things for me about the ucaster is how pervasive it has become in my life and how much I love to use it. I love our apps. I love one step publishing and having people from serious programmers to my mother use the same tool. I love how it’s as easy to get stuff off the Web as it is to get it on. And I love the fact that if someone doesn’t want to use our homepage app or has their own java app (and even more soon) that they are perfectly welcome to do so.

And my favourite thing? The ucaster isn’t about us. It’s about you.

And that’s as it should be.

Happy sharing

Lowering the Barriers to Web Citizenship

vanessa — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 13:25:58 +0000

Leigh will have plenty to say later on about why we’re so stoked about our new product, ucaster—but first I want to say a little bit about why we built the tecnhnology behind the product in the first place.

In a nutshell, it just bugged me that every computer and every device was not actually a node on the Web. Despite the fact that personal computers in particular are more than powerful enough to act as web servers, the physical and logical topology of the Interent as deployed relegates most devices to being web clients only.

The Web 2.0 phenomenon has improved the capabilities of lowly web-clients, allowing them to contribute content as well as consume it. This is a great thing, and I don’t mean any insult by saying that by itself it just isn’t enough.

I wanted a Web that was end-to-end. Where every device could provide as well as consume web services and content. Where every shared resource had a resolvable URL.

Just because your laptop or your phone don’t have the full power and connectivity of the “great server cloud in the sky” there’s still plenty you can do with them if they’re able to join the network in an active capacity.

So that’s what we set out to do. Our first product, ucaster, is intended to be the easiest method ever invented for publishing your own content on the web. If you can drag files from one folder to another, you’re an expert user already. There are no servers in between you and your friends (or colleagues) with web browsers viewing your content. We don’t upload anything anywhere, we don’t replicate anything anywhere. You own your own stuff. You control who sees it and when. We’re just flinging packets around to make that possible.

I hope you enjoy the freedom. We certainly do.

Hello World

team — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 16:06:13 +0000

Welcome to the oponia networks blog. This is where we will be posting all things relating to, yep, you guessed it, the oponia ucaster.