(Links taken from Czech wiki article, https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Unite )
(I've never been fan of Opera but this project seemed great and so ahead of it's time. In retrospect I regret my antipathy prevented me to even try it.)
I used it and was all-in, sure that this was going to change the interwebs overnight, kinda like I went all-in on XHTML & semantics (eg microformats).
One of the facets was like Facebook's wall, they called it the "fridge door" IIRC, your friends could leave messages p2p and you could open directories really easily to share with anyone who had the right credentials (your "friends"). It really did pop out the middlemen -- share files direct from your computer by giving someone a link (like you would with Dropbox, but peer to peer); message people like on Facebook, but p2p ... some of that might be anticipation of developments rather than the actual product as set. It makes a lot of sense to me.
I ran into some folk who shared their torrent folder. These curated lists were something wonderful. You could even ask if something could be seeded. It elevated BitTorrent to new levels: You could make a torrent from anything, it made it available automatically and if someone showed an interest in it it was easy to switch on seeding. We had lots of fun watching old black and white movies.
"In a nutshell, Opera Unite is a collaborative technology that uses a compact server inside the Opera desktop browser to share data and services. You can write applications — in the form of Opera Unite Services — that use this server to serve content to other Web users."
One of the facets was like Facebook's wall, they called it the "fridge door" IIRC, your friends could leave messages p2p and you could open directories really easily to share with anyone who had the right credentials (your "friends"). It really did pop out the middlemen -- share files direct from your computer by giving someone a link (like you would with Dropbox, but peer to peer); message people like on Facebook, but p2p ... some of that might be anticipation of developments rather than the actual product as set. It makes a lot of sense to me.