Opera Software, the nettlesome little Norwegian browser company responsible for Microsoft's current antitrust miseries with the European Commission, says it's "reinvented the web."

Actually it's more a stab at reinventing the browser to make it more of the platform Netscape threatened it would be and hence heighten Opera's lowly 0.7% market share on computers.

A free new Opera service called Opera Unite is supposed to turn a desktop into a server so it can serve content to other desktops directly. That way the data stays on the originator's desktop and never touches web-serving middlemen like, say, Flickr or Facebook.

The originator controls who sees what from web-wide to a few special friends armed with a secret password - well, so long as the originator stays online. If he goes offline, the content goes with him.

Although it claims to "decentralize and democratize the cloud," Opera Unite isn't at all like the device-agnostic 24/7 cloud.

It also offers ample room for all kinds of mischief from security issues to illegal file sharing.

On entry the widgetry offers six services that run in the browser - file sharing, a web server for running entire web sites, a media player, photo sharing, a chat "Lounge" and a "Fridge" for leaving notes. Opera's expecting users to develop more and promises more of its own.

Opera Unite is part of a special version of the Opera 10 browser. The services run in a sandbox and connections depend on Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) - which has no authentication mechanism - unless Opera has to help with some special server-side technology. See http://labs.opera.com/.