Opera Unite vs. POW

[Static-Pulse]

Opera Unite: http://unite.opera.com/

Firefox POW: http://davidkellogg.com/wiki/Main_Page

I fiddled around a little with Opera Unite this weekend, and I think I've noodled a bit with POW before. Any one else? I'm kind of intrigued by the possibilities of putting a web server into a browser, which I'm sure Dave Winer would be the first to point out isn't that new of an idea. (Not meant to be a dig at Mr. Winer, more of a shout out to his favoring desktop web servers since before my first web page.)

Is this the future of forums like Bleeding Cool and Facebook, where each of us will run a small portion of the whole site on our computers and the domain will act as a hub/proxy to get around firewalls? Is this model better ormworse than a single, central system?

Any thoughts?

[_OM_]

...I'm going to play retard for a minute here:

[FGJ]

...Duh, could you explain in layman's terms just exactly what these two packages are, and why anyone would use them?

[/FGJ]

[Static-Pulse]

...Duh, could you explain in layman's terms just exactly what these two packages are, and why anyone would use them?

I can't speak for POW, but the nice thing about Unite is that it has a neat proxy feature so even behind a firewall, you can serve web pages. That's neat, to me, because AFAICT the biggest hurdle keeping people running more home servers is knowing how to setup their routers to NAT properly.

As for why anyone would use either? Right now, there's not a big reason. However, I think the next generation of web apps, or apps in general, are going to be two-way. Right now web sites are mostly one way: we push things to and pull things from central servers. Bleeding Cool is an example of this.

Imagine, though, if part of Bleeding Cool existed on your computer. Your posts and others were backed up on the users computers. It wouldn't be pure P2P, the BleedingCool.com site would track who was online, maybe manage user profiles, etc. However, it wouldn't have to hold the single copy of the database, usage of the site wouldn't be dependent on one server being up, and Mark's bandwidth charges would be a lot less because users would shoulder the load of it.

Being able to wrap all that up in a browser...making the development platform close to some web developers are accustomed to...that's just gravy.