Opera had something called Unite just before it went under; it was a web-server that ran on the browser and allowed you to connect to friends p2p for sharing, etc., it wasn't quite there but it had the concept of the 'net as _the_ social network without intermediates.

I was really excited by the concept and thought we were on track to have "the next Facebook". Primarily it needed caching to handle self-hosted content not being always on.

Still hopeful we can move on that direction so we can self-host and publish to different platforms, etc..