Everyone had a bit of a chuckle when Opera coyly announced that they were about to "reinvent the web," the other day. I certainly had my doubts. After all, we had nothing to go by other than a bright red background, a little cloud, and some comments buried inside HTML code.

While I'm not certain I would call what Opera has done with Unite (version 10 of its browser) a reinvention of the web, it's certainly a clever, inventive twist on the run-of-the-mill web browser.

So what is it?

Unite sits in Opera's side toolbar and adds various server features to the browser. By default it includes file, media, and photo sharing, a web server, chat room, and "fridge" for storing notes. There are no additional Unite services available yet, though it's safe to assume that community-produced options will start appearing soon (developer resources are listed here).

You configure your sharing options - choose a base directory, set access permissions - and Opera provides a URL you can provide to your friends. Sure, there are hundreds of websites we already use to share media, leave each other messages, and chat, but Opera Unite lets you do it with a single registration and without uploading any of your content to a remote server.

Unite's sharing pages render just fine in other browsers, so you friends don't have to be running Opera. As with previous Opera releases, it's available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

The browser itself hasn't changed - it's still Opera 10, love it or hate it. The new Unite functions are very clever and do add a certain amount of cool factor. It will be interesting to see if the new features can increase the size Opera's fan base.

Take Unite for a spin and share your thoughts, or have a look at the gallery (work in progress)!

If you've been looking for a way to stream music from your iTunes library on the web that "just works," you should give pulpTunes a look. With pulpTunes, it's extremely easy to set up a stream at a private URL, and even password protect it. Even better, it's available on all platforms.

The basic premise of a web server for your music is pretty cool, but pulpTunes throws in a lot of other iTunes-ish perks, including AAC support, album art, and iTunes DJ support. You can also download songs from your iTunes, or share a direct link to a song or playlist with your friends. That's a lot of features for an app that's so simple to set up.

[via AppScout]

That is, Keep Internets Serving, Stupid. During the Superbowl VIZIO used an ad to encourage everyone to immediately visit their website and register to win a TV. Guess how that ended? Yeah, for several hours their Flash-laden site wasn't available. Anyone remember the ill-fated Dr. Pepper campaign?

Today, Denny's is giving away free breakfasts. Of course, dennys.com is dead as a hammer. Something tells me cutting IT staff isn't helping. I'm not saying Denny's has cut staff, but IT has increasingly been tasked with "do more with less" even before the recession hit the fan.

So what do you do, as a marketer? We all made lots of fun of Twitter for a while when the service would fail, didn't we? But the Fail Whale has made increasingly shorter appearances (sources say the robot wanted less money anyway and the whale got a gig on "Flapjack" for Cartoon Network). I met one of the engineers of Twitter recently, and I learned that they learned some very important lessons in scaling the past year or so...

Marketers need to learn to anticipate promotional effects on servers, end of story. Don't write a check your host can't cash, basically. Does it mean spending money on infrastructure? Not necessarily. It will, however, likely mean some code and server jockeying to ensure your site is lean and distributed and capable of a temporary spike in traffic. Digg, Twitter, Flickr and plenty of other sites have learned this the hard way. Now it's Madison Avenue's turn, I guess.

Openfire is an open-source Jabber (XMPP) server that provides an easy way to offer and maintain internal instant messaging (including voice and video chat) for your company or organization. There are server plugins available which can add archiving and statistics capabilities as well as message of the day and multi-user chat (MUC) bookmarks.

Openfire conveniently supports LDAP and Active Directory authentication as well as SSL for encrypting communications. If you require high availability, you can enable clustering to eliminate a single point of failure. Common databases like MySQL, Microsoft SQL, and PostgreSQL are supported, or you can use Openfire's embedded database.

While the developers offer a web-based (SparkWeb) client and install-based (Spark) client, it's possible to use any IM client that supports Jabber (Adium, Pidgin, iChat, etc.). Openfire runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows and since it's Java based, it will require that you have a JRE installed.

YouGetSignal provides a bunch of tools for looking things up. You can find the location of a phone number on a Google Map, find open ports on your internet connection, or perform a visual trace route (which traces the route packets of data make on the internet when traveling from your computer to another destination).

We recently discovered a new YouGetSignal tool: a reverse IP domain check. Just type a URL in the box, and YouGetSignal will attempt to discover other web sites using the same server. This comes in handy if you want to find URLs registered to a certain company, or if you have a shared hosting plan for your own web site and you want to see what other sites are sharing your server space.

For example, I discovered that there are 856 domains hosted on the same server as www.google.com, and 841 hosted on the same server as www.downloadsquad.com.

[via MakeUseOf]

There was a toss up this week about whether it would be better to dig right in to the Linux HTML editors, or to wax poetic about setting up LAMP so that those choosing to go the content management system (CMS) route could test any changes they made with such editors on their local machines.

We ultimately decided to tackle setting up a LAMP testing ground. This will certainly not be necessary for every single person out there who just wants to put up a web site. If your site is not using PHP-driven content that interacts with or requires a database backend, and you just plan on designing static web pages, there is absolutely no need to do any of this.

If you are perfectly content to upload your site and integrate any supporting elements (once again, things like databases) live and on the web and make changes there, where it is possible that everyone can see your style sheet testing or things may be temporarily broken, you don't need to do this either.

Some people, though, really like to get things on their CMS tweaked to near perfection before releasing their content on the world. Other people need to know exactly what a dynamic site is going to look and act like before it goes live. The combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) makes this possible.

DockDrop is a simple Mac OS X application that lets you easily and quickly upload files to an FTP, WebDAV, or SCP server, with added support for Flickr uploads.

When DockDrop is open, it resides quietly on your dock (hence the name). When you want to upload a file or folder, simply drop the item onto the Dockdrop icon (see again why the name is so apt?). Dockdrop will prompt you for the upload method of your choice, upload the file, and put a URL for your upload on the clipboard, ready for pasting into an email, chat program or website.

Dockdrop offers set-it-and-forget-it functionality: once you enter in your server credentials, Dockdrop will store the settings, so you won't have to enter them again.

One of the added bonuses of DockDrop (besides its simplicity and ease of use) is the Flickr integration. After a simple authentication process, you can drag and drop your images onto DockDrop and they upload seamlessly to your Flickr account.

Dockdrop is free, and requires an Intel Mac with 10.4 or 10.5.

[via AppScout]

Apple appears to have changed its stance on virtualization... a little. The licensing agreement for OS X 10.4 strictly reads that you can only run Tiger on a single "Apple-labeled computer." And while the license for the desktop version of OS X 10.5 Leopard states the same restriction, Apple'se license for the server version of Leopard holds a little surprise.

You still need to buy a separate license for every Leopard Server installation. But in addition to installing Leopard Server on an Apple machine, you can install multiple copies of OS X 10.5 Server on a single machine. In other words, once VMWare and Parallels offer support for Leopard virtualization, you'll be all set.

This change does not apply to the desktop operating system. And Apple still strictly forbids installation of OS X on a non-Apple computer, which means there's no way to run Leopard on a PC without violating the terms of your license. Still, it's nice to see Apple crack the window a bit, even if they're not ready to open the door and let you run OS X, Linux, Windows all on the same box (unless you bought that box from Apple).

[via tuaw]

You may have noticed that some of your favorite websites went dark Tuesday afternoon. That includes LiveJournal, TypePad, Wired's blogs (but not Wired's main web site).

Turns out that's what happens when there's a major power outage in San Francisco where more than a few tech companies happen to be located.

More than 30,000 electric customers in the area lost power after an underground explosion. And while you would think big customers like oh, I don't know, Netflix would have a system in place to switch to a backup server if the main server goes down, the site was out for most of today.

While power hasn't been restored to all customers yet, several sites that were offline earlier today are back up and running, including Craiglist and Netflix. But this is the second time this week that we've heard of a massive internet outage. Coincidence? We certainly hope so.

Google has turned some of its focus off of hardware manufacturing, and handed production over to Dell in order to increase performance on its line of search appliances.

Google has had issues with scaling the development of the search appliance since it has proved to be such a popular device with over 7000 corporate customers. Google had to either choose to increase staff, work on the manufacturing, or look for a third party to help out. Dell's server architecture, particularly the 9G, stood out to Google as it offered leading performance in many areas including server management. Dell will now be assembling the Google enterprise search boxes from components supplied by a variety of manufacturers, and will be in charge of the shipping and receiving.

Dell has already started touting Google as a customer in ads that aim at business customers. And hey, why not. Its not every day that a company as well known and as impactful to society as Google hands over their trust in you.

EasyPHP is a great little web server package, as you might expect, it has the usual LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack, with phpMyAdmin, and a few other things. The only issue you might have with the EasyPHP 1.8 release is that it uses PHP 4. This may not be a problem unless you really need some of those sweet new features from PHP5. No word yet on when the folks at EasyPHP will be including PHP5, but we hope it will be soon. The more web development you do in PHP, you start to want those new features more and more. If you need a PHP4 based web server for testing or other purposes, EasyPHP is great.

If you just can't get enough of that PHP5 goodness though, you're out of luck, especially for someone who doesn't want to go inserting PHP5 into EasyPHP and bringing the whole shebang down on their heads. There is a web server solution that includes PHP5 in a slim package that is seamless and you could almost say exciting. WAMP5 installs quick and does a kill job of it. It more accurately reflects the fact that this is Windows not Linux we're using, thus the WAMP name. A great part of WAMP is the built in service support and simplified administration panel.

The downside to WAMP is that it is only a desktop installed application, not playing nice with your portable web-serving needs. While not a real drawback, it can be useful to have a portable web server running on a stick for a web developer on the go. EasyPHP does work well on a portable drive, so long as you can live without PHP5 for a bit. For most things either web server package will work just fine. They both are small downloads, easy to install and run without a hitch, and make your life easier. Both packages are also free, which helps with sticker shock.

Remember the days when you had to change each file one by one on FTP and re-upload? Yeah, those days are over.

Now that Google's Gmail is open for everyone worldwide, free of charge, Google's Sergey Brin has been rumored to have said that they will start selling upgraded packages for additional data storage capacities. They have found out that there are many users that have extraordinary storage needs for online email, and will be sorting out different packages that will be introduced later this year. The charges could be inline with Google's Picasa online photo storage service that comes with 250MB of free storage but charges yearly fees of US$25 for 6.25GB up to $500 for 250GB of storage.

This is going to make a lot of people happy. Many users are experiencing full Gmail accounts, and $25 isn't a lot to ask for an additional 6.25GB of searchable online secure storage space that can be accessed wherever you are.

Microsoft's just announced Windows Home Server (WHS) receives what are mad props from long-time Microsoft critic and beta tester Paul Thurrott, which is encouraging. He says a lot about WHS and prov ides some great details on the system. Mostly that it will make backing up, restoring, file sharing and media distribution easy and almost fun for even the average consumer. Contrary to the buzz, the box is not primarily for media, though it is one of the features you can use it for via Media Connect. HP will be offering specialized hardware for the WHS software from Microsoft, or you can buy your own hardware to put the software on, if you want. If WHS is as simple and useful as Paul says, I can see a lot of non-techies buying a home server.

WHS software is built on Windows 2003 R2 and allows the home PC user to add hot-swappable storage, remotely access any PC on your network, backup all PCs on your network, whether they are wired or wireless, and automatically keeps track of all the files stored as well. There are no drive letters, just one big storage pool. Several Microsoft research technologies are used to bring many features not seen before in this type of device. Read Paul's full review for a lot more detail and the whole idea behind the Windows Home Server.

Today Microsoft and Zend Technologies--the corporate face of ultra-popular web programming language PHP--announced a "technical collaboration to enhance the experience of running [PHP] on Windows Server 2003." The collaboration will entail technical improvements to Windows Server which will be released under the open source PHP license, Microsoft releasing a FastCGI component for IIS, Zend establishing a Windows testing lab "to maintain high performance of PHP on the Windows Server platform as PHP evolves," and active participation in the PHP community "ensuring open discussion to help developers planning to deploy PHP applications on the Windows Server platform."

This move is mutually beneficial to both companies. Microsoft wins by wooing PHP developers--traditionally an open source lot--to their platform and stemming migration to LAMP with promises of improved performance, and Zend wins by getting in good with Microsoft's own large and loyal circle of developers. "Since our preliminary work with Microsoft, we have already seen a better than 100 percent performance gain with some PHP applications on Windows Server 2003," says Andi Gutmans, Zend co-founder and CTO. He also claims that "a majority of PHP developers [are] developing on the Windows platform," though he does not make the distinction between developing on Windows and deploying on it.

One of our favorite sites (yours and mine) is down this morning. What does this mean for Digg? Crazy-cool new changes and upgraded features? Has Digg been hacked, or is this routine? "Out of service" doesn't look too good, but is this just web 2.0-speak for hold-on we're kicking-up the good stuff another notch? I don't remember Netscape going down to launch their video product site-wide, but perhaps this isn't a good comparison to make? Here's to hoping that this is nothing bad for Digg, and that it will be back online very soon. We miss you Digg, come back to us soon.