We need more acronyms, I was hoping for an exciting story about how prisoner of war with access only to firefox was able to hack into a webserver and post the details of imprisonment, thus leading to his eventual rescue.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Somehow gaining small access to an internet connected computer and slowly being able to create a system to serve out distress messages. I was pretty disappointed when I clicked the link...haha
Turning a browser into a web server is not a big leap in technology. That is not a hard problem.
Why I am excited about Opera Unite and not about this firefox extension is that Opera themselves thinks that this will change the face of internet applications. They are excited about it and they will persue this to the end. That is the whole point.
It is not about technology. It is about how you push it and persue it. It is all about your vision.
My vision says that Opera Unite isn't going to live up to the hype. Users don't want a music player in their browser, they want a good music player. Opera would do better to build a sturdy, dedicated server side JavaScript environment than to put a weak offering into their browser.
"Users don't want a music player in their browser, they want a good music player."
And, incidentally, iTunes already has sharing from within the player and it is very widely used.
Anyway, Unite is an interesting experiment, even though it probably won't revolutionize anything on its own. The "this will revolutionize the web!" PR sort of obscures the actually utility/novelty that this likely has for a subset of users.
I assume this was posted in connection with the news about Unite. I remember when Google introduced Gears someone on reddit or HN pointed to this extension. I was curious about it and tried it in my computer at work.
First of all, this thing works and it gets the job done. But it feels too hard to actually use it everyday for a non-geeky person. The point of Opera offering is not only the platform itself but also the list of Unite services they already provide (photo-sharing and fridge cover most of my needs).
I'm pretty sure one could use POW to ultimately bring Unite to Firefox.
This is as dry as it gets, folks. If you can say "If only there was a way to get POW to run PHP.JS" with a straight face, there is nothing beyond your reach.
