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.
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.
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.
So I've got Hello World running at http://localhost:6670/test.sjs , but I'm not sure if this is exposed to the outside web.