dW

My Opera, Thoughts, and Suggestions To Improve It

I’ve always hated online communities throughout my experience on the World Wide Web as I am extremely allergic to idiots. Online communities tend to fill themselves up with people of questionable intelligence that just ruins it for everyone else. As a result of my past experiences I was skeptical about My Opera. I’ve been a member of My Opera since May of 2003, but have only really been a part of it within this past year and a half. I watched the community over a period of time and came to the realization that My Opera is different, very different. Since then I’ve made numerous posts in the Forums (mainly in the Macintosh forum), made a skin, and have made some good friends along the way. I’ve even started a temporary log (more about this later).

People are united in this community because of Opera. I started using Opera as my primary browser with version 7.0 preview on Windows.¹ I’ve since grown into a sort of fanatic about the browser even when hating it in previous versions. Since I use a Macintosh now, there are numerous browsers out there that dare I say work better than Opera (at least on the Mac). I still use Opera despite any reasons not to (there are plenty on the Macintosh), and lobby to make it integrate better with the Mac. I’d say because of that I’m rather unique (well as unique as the other Mac Opera fanatics here).² I use a minority operating system with a minority browser.

My Opera has become a daily stop for me, and a few of my newsfeeds consist of blogs from My Opera. I’ve come to think of My Opera as not just a community, but as a group in of itself just like the numerous Opera Groups out there. We are all members of a unique family, a family of Opera users. This brings me to my first suggestion. Why not allow Opera users to identify themselves as Opera users no matter where they are? How can this be done? This can be done with OpenID. Wikipedia sums up its usefulness quite well:

On OpenID-enabled sites, Internet users don’t need to create and manage a new account for every site before being granted access. Instead, they only need to be able to authenticate with a trusted site that supports OpenID, called the identity provider (or IdP, sometimes called an i-broker). The identity provider can then confirm ownership of the user’s OpenID identifier to other OpenID-enabled sites, called relying parties or RPs. Unlike most single sign-on architectures, OpenID does not specify the authentication mechanism. Therefore, the strength of an OpenID login depends on how much a relying party knows about the authentication policies of the identity provider. Without such knowledge, OpenID is not meant to be used on sensitive accounts (banking, e-commerce transactions, etc.), but if an identity provider uses strong authentication, OpenID can be used for all types of transactions.

My idea is not to allow people to log into My Opera with an OpenID, but for Opera to create an OpenID server that will allow people to identify themselves elsewhere as Opera users on OpenID enabled websites. In other words My Opera in my opinion still needs their own login system, but only use OpenID to identify as opera users elsewhere. Simon Willison created a screencast a little more than a month ago demonstrating how to use OpenID that can demonstrate how to use it better than I can ever describe it just using words here. Opera could create a login page for OpenID at my.opera.com/openid/ and our OpenIDs would be username.my.opera.com so mine would be khadgar.my.opera.com. As the video demonstrates, if you type your username into an OpenID enabled login area you will be wisked over to the login page for your id’s server and then brought back to the page you logged in with.

I mentioned earlier in this post that this log is temporary. I could procure a long list of improvements I think should be made to the blogging system on My Opera, but no matter what is done it won’t be good enough for me. I want absolute control over my log right down to the code that makes it work. I am attempting (along with a friend of mine) to program and design my on log to use elsewhere on the web, and because of that I would like OpenID to be implemented so that Opera users here can identify themselves on my log to create the beginnings of an Extended Opera Community where many sites can be part of the Opera Community, but with My Opera as the center of it all. Websites such as Opera Watch and Opera Wiki that already exist can benefit from this.

How would My Opera be the center of it all? Well on the main page My Opera could show a small list on the right sidebar of “Extended Community” highlights either picked automatically through an updatable Atom feed or by Espen (like he doesn’t have a lot of work already) and the rest of the My Opera team.