What Opera is about to Unveil?

Hmmmm... This fellow's suggestion may sound far-fetched, but if you look at the source code of the page by Opera:<p><pre><code> &#60;!-- We start our little story with the invention of the modern day computer. Over the years, the computers grew in numbers, and the next natural step in the evolution was to connect them together. To share things. But as these little networks grew, some computers gained more power than the rest and called themselves servers ... --&#62; </code></pre> I'm not sure what to make of it...

I know general guidelines say that titles should not be edited usually, but in this case a hint that it is all one man's wild speculation would have been nice and I would have not have bothered to read it at all.

I had the idea of a webserver on each machine in 2002, and they were connected across the p2p Gnutella network, where searches were contents by substring (not just filename). I got as far as writing a webserver, which ended up in Gnucleus (the Gnutella client), got 100 million downloads as part of Morpheus Preview Edition (same as Gnucleus), but wasn't enabled because the guy who wrote Gnucleus didn't get it.<p>In 2004, I did the same with Limewire, but again, nobody included my code.<p>I've come to accept it as a total failure, and since then I've known that it's best to get the job done yourself, as otherwise collaboration depends on their priorities.

Course, could just leverage opera's built in torrent functionality - sharing amongst opera users at least. Maybe somehow interoperable with Weave? Although I think that somewhat goes against Weaves point currently, being to keep your firefox installs on various machines in sync.

Noticed the "freedom" in the URL? Does that mean something?<p>The Hicksdesign tweet also says something about the convenience of having "a connection wherever you are" = Freedom?<p>I don't know, but here is what I think:<p>Opera is already serving millions of mobile users through their proxy servers. I think there is support in the upcoming version of Opera(v10) to connect to the web though the proxy server. Now they certainly would want to monetize this traffic. What would they do? Give internet connection for free (using some USB device) and then serve ads. But how does this USB device connect to the servers? May be they have made a tie up with some telecom majors.<p>Of course, this is also a speculation , just as ridiculous as the OP.

I'm not familiar with the author, but I don't see why embedding the server would change things. Mac OS X has had one-click Apache since it was released and I would imagine OS X has a larger active install base than Opera. Of course, Opera has had a lot of innovation trickle into other browsers (tabs, thumbnails, etc.), so maybe they've solved some other issues involved with personal web hosting.<p>The "hard parts" would be reliable dns resolution, finding common ISP open ports, and security of all kinds.

This couldn't be true. By embedding a web server, you imply that all mainstream routers are aware of the web server thing and can route a query to itself correctly to the desired computer. As the IPv4 thing and all the huge local network used in family (your wireless router) and enterprise, a embedding web server can hardly serve anything on the Internet unless you get router manufacturers' support.<p>Still, you can achieve the "web server" thing by establishing a client-server connection to the Opera central server and the Opera central server will act like a "router". That, is more like what Windows Live file sharing feature.<p>Opera all these years acts like a good citizen with W3C's guideline. There is no way for Opera to support two-way ajax because there is no general standard.

My bet is on a combination of<p><pre><code> (a) Dynamic DNS client (b) UPnP client (c) built-in browser </code></pre> I.e. every installation of Opera gets its own unique permanent DNS record, which is dynamically updated to the IP of the host computer. The UPnP is used to make the Opera instance accessible from the Internet and the Web server is used for sharing stuff.<p>Specifically, if I need to share a file with someone, the Opera will host this file locally and generate a unique URL that will point at my box and will be served by Opera's web server. I will then be able to pass this URL around and the recipients will fetch the file using their browsers directly from my machine.

If I may speculate as well. I really hope they will open source their browser. I'm not sure how likely it is, but it would be really cool.<p>I hadn't heard of this before, but now my interest is peaked.

XMPP is more probable than a full on web server

Opera will be the new Kazaa. It's going to be P2P glory all over again.

Don't forget guys, the web likes free. :)