There's a thread on Twitter with lots of people cc'd and because of the 140 char limit, you basically have to say what you have to say in 60 chars or less, because most of the space is taken up with people's handles. So it's micro-snorts and grunts, instead of the usual full-size snorts and grunts. A few comments here with more room to breathe. Whew.

When I'm talking about running a server I'm not thinking of the same servers you and I as techies run. I'm thinking of making that a lot easier. I know it can be done. In the early days of the web, we had servers on the Mac that were just apps you launched. They served content from a folder on port 80. They used normal dialogs for configuration. They were fully programmable, but very useful without programming. Setting one of these things up was a lot easier than setting up Dropbox, for example, today.

If you programmers still don't want users running servers, then I propose you look at your thinking a bit, and wonder if you're perhaps a member of the computing "priesthood," trying to protect what you do from the unwashed masses? If so, you're on the wrong side of history, imho. The inexorable process of tech is taking things you used to need to be a wizard to do, and making them easy for normal people.

If you had told my grad school room-mates that someday everyone would have not just one computer, but lots of them, and we'd carry them around in our pockets, they would have thought you were nuts. That's the way techies are, often -- limited imaginations. But reality is a lot more weird than you think, over time.