Along with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, Opera is one of the world’s most popular net browsers, and it’s just rolled out a new service that could see it grab an even bigger piece of the user pie, Opera Unite. It’s not about faster load times, better security or flinging as many confusing acronyms as possible at you, but something entirely different. Instead, Opera Unite turns your browser into a web server. For consumers, it’s a fantastic way to stream music remotely through a browser (Ideal for those at work pining for their iTunes libraries) and pull up pictures from your hard drive wherever you are, but Opera Unite goes one step further by letting you simply and easily host a website through your own browser – and that doesn’t have to be Opera, incidentally.

It’s essentially an easy to use FTP server, but it opens up a whole new way for browsers and software to head. At a glance, it goes directly against the trend of cloud computing, sticking all the workload on your end, but Opera claims it’s the next step democratizing the cloud – by moving workloads away from data centres to every computer on every street.

It’s only a start of course: the web hosting service Opera Unite lets you run flat out doesn’t do PHP or mySQL, but it’s good to see a browser going away, coming up with something truly inventive and flipping the box. It’ll be interesting to see if Mozilla, the other relative minnow in the browser space (Microsoft, Apple and Google are the other main competitors), will move this way,and whether this will change how we see the internet working. Opera’s opened up the whole service to developers, so there’s no reason why not: it could make running an internet start up a whole lot cheaper. I’m waiting to have my eyes opened.

Tracking the top ten most popular online brands, Nielsen Online found that UK users spent on average one minute every eight minutes on the social networking site, equating to a total of 3.8 billion minutes in total for the month of April. So those of you who thought that Twitter was stealing some of Facebook’s limelight can think again. Twitter didn’t even make the top ten web brands last month.

As you’d expect, the usual suspects are all present in the list, with Windows Live (Hotmail) and Google completing the podium. Unsurprisingly in these hard-up times eBay makes an appearance at number four with two billion minutes, and Yahoo rounding off the top five.

In all the the top ten made up for 45 per cent of all the time spent on the internet in the UK. That’s a phenomenal figure that shows just how powerful the big boys on the web are. It’s this sentiment that’s echoed by the people at Nielsen Online: “The Internet is a complex and varied ecosystem and I think most people would be surprised by just how much time is accounted for by a relatively few brands who, in turn, are increasing their share of the pie.” said a spokesperson for the company.

If the little man is to get a larger slice of the internet pie, he’s going to have to use all the internet tools at his disposal. That means, among other things, understanding and using SEO to your advantage, creating a community for your website, and pushing stories out there. All elements that we at Republic adhere to and promote. Who knows, with a little hard work and luck you’ll see us on that list next year…

Top ten web brands in the UK for April
1. Facebook – 6.2 billion minutes
2. Windows Live – 4.5 billion minutes
3. Google – 2.6 billion minutes
4. eBay – 2.0 billion minutes
5. Yahoo! – 1.7 billion minutes
6. AOL – 1.5 billion minutes
7. BBC – 1.1 billion minutes
8. YouTube – 898 million minutes
9. Microsoft – 733 million minutes
10. Apple – 719 million minutes