It would be very interesting if Google bought Opera. Opera is a pretty sweet browser which I’ve always liked, and even paid for back before they went free (which, as it turns out, was partly due to Google).

Let the speculation begin on what might happen if they owned a browser. My hunch would be that it’s some kind of pre-emptive defense against IE. If all of the crazy theories are true that Google is setting it’s sights on being your Operating System, but in a browser – as long as 90% of the users out there are using a browser built by a company that has a vested interest in you buying their Operating System and not Google’s, that would be an extremely weak point in their strategy. Microsoft would still control what you can and can’t do.

With Opera you get a cross-platform, fast, mature, secure browser that is closed-source and proprietary (which may be an advantage). You can start building features on it via the same “embrace and extend” philosophy that Microsoft used with IE. It must kill Google to have to say “Google Desktop – requires Windows” or “Picasa – requires Windows and IE”. How much nicer it would be for them to say – here are all of our apps, Google Browser required, underlying OS – meaningless.

The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005. About half of these sites were new to me. For some reason I really want to try them all.

Ok, I guess he doesn’t really suck most of the time, but his recent alertbox was half amusing and half ironic. First, as he mentions at the bottom, it was a near clone of an old article he wrote about frames. Although, realisitcally, I think we can all think of a bunch of times we’ve been pissed off at frames on a website, but probably have some trouble coming up with a similar list of sites that use AJAX. In any case, despite the fact that he makes some good points, he lists this near the bottom: “Next month: Micropayments will take off in 2006.”

For god sakes, will he please stop talking about Micropayments? He started yammering about them in 1998. In his 5 year retrospective in 2000, he said that “I repeat my prediction from 1998: micropayments will happen in about two years (of course, this now means 2002, not 2000).” In his 10 year retrospective in 2005, he doesn’t mention them at all. Now I guess he thinks they’ll be hitting the scene big in 2006. Well, I admire him for sticking to his guns but he should really give up. Micropayments never took off, and never will, for the reasons Clay Shirky outlined in 2003. And now, with the dawn of Google AdSense, I think it’s fair to say that Micropayments are dead. If my content is really good, I’ll charge a subscription to see it (ex. the new york times). If it’s not great, I’ll give it away for free (ex. this blog), and if it’s pretty good but I’d like to make a few bucks off it, I’ll set up Google AdSense (ex. digg). Someone tell Nielsen to drop the micropayments talk before we start treating everything he says as irrelevant ( even though most of it is pretty good).