Author: stephanned

Hi, I wasn’t really planning on writing anything here again, but after the announcement that MyOpera would be discontinued, followed by Jon’s decision to create a new community at vivaldi.net I felt I should, at least, bide farewell with the platform I designed so many years ago in my own way.

First of all, do join Jon’s new community effort at vivaldi.net. While they’re clearly not at the same level yet, they are working hard on it! I have registered (as stephanned) and so should you!

I read the official post on closing MyOpera down and I am astonished at the historical inaccuracies:

“In 2006, we had a silly but fun idea. “What if we put our forums on steroids? Let’s build a site where you can blog, share photos and add each other as friends.” At that time, there were no good services for what we wanted. We decided to build it ourselves.”

That couldn’t be further from the truth. It was not 2006 (when I left, early in the year), we launched this in 2003, that can be easily verified by looking at my earliest blog posts. After that, we pioneered SPARQL, added a great photo sharing service and, as a policy, made sure to violently listen to our users and adapt the platform to what they wanted. To write this off as a silly experiment is, well, it shows that the people behind that post clearly are unaware of the history of this site.

Thanks for all the good years we had together back then — I hope you enjoyed the ride. And if you feel like contacting me, I’m at @stephanned on Twitter.