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Opera to Shut Down My Opera Service

Opera Opera-icon-high-resannounced today that they are shutting down My Opera, a community/blogging/sharing platform, on 1 March 2014. The entire platform is going away, including the email service, so today Opera gave users a 4 month warning so they can backup their content and find a new place to hang out.

My Opera had initially launched in 2001 as a support forum, but it wasn’t until 2006 that things really took off. That’s when Opera turned it into a quasi-social network where users could "blog, share photos and add each other as friends".

But times change, and Opera no longer has the resources to keep My Opera up and running. And so they are asking users to backup their content. Opera has even offered a ist of instructions:

  1. First of all, grab a copy of all your stuff. Use our download tool to backup your blog posts and photos.
  2. Investigate your options. There are many great services out there. Perhaps you want to bring some of your friends along to a new place? Let them know where you want to go. Maybe you can write a blog post about it?
  3. When you’re ready for the switch, sign up for a new social network. We’ve provided some links here. You might know of some more good sites. Feel free to comment here and let us know.
  4. If you’re one of our email users, sign up for a new email service and set up an autoreply in My Opera to let your contacts know about your new address.
  5. Then, forward your email to your new email address.
  6. If you have a blog, make your readers aware of the switch. You could write a post with a link to your new blog and make it sticky so it stays prominently at the top of the page.

Opera is even killing the email service; they’ve suggested that users find a new service and forward any emails they want to save.

In case you’re interested, I know that Gmail has an easy to use import feature called Mail Fetcher. When I used it I was able to transfer thousands of emails without any difficulty. It grabbed everything, so far as I know.

I have to confess, this is the first time I had heard that Opera even had this type of platform. Has anyone used it?

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Comments


Felix October 31, 2013 um 3:46 pm

I used My Opera for years. It was a friendly place, with nice features, and a great community. I’ve met many interesting people there, and learned surprising things about remote places. Heck, I know an international couple who met on My Opera and later married. It’s hard not to be disappointed, even though we were all expecting this to happen as of late, as the previously prompt and friendly developers dropped off the face of the network one by one.

That said, it’s a good thing that they’re giving ample warning and providing export tools. Not that I need it, my stuff is already backed up. But social networks seldom do that when they close down, and years of memories are wiped from millions of people. Tears in the rain and all that.

And yes, there were millions of us on My Opera. Nothing comparable to Facebook… more like a nice little town on the Internet. But it was ours, and we loved it. Except apparently it wasn’t.


53north November 3, 2013 um 4:48 pm

I think they gave up in the face of spam attacks and MIL hacking whenever somebody posted something high profile about a country’s policies, or lack of…
It worked best pre-2008, when it was still un-kosher…


Opera Founder Launches Rival Web Browser for Power Users ⋆ Ink, Bits, & Pixels January 27, 2015 um 10:29 pm

[…] year. That site feels like  a replacement for the My Opera community which Opera shuttered in October 2013, and it provides email, social, and blogging […]


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