Contribute to a Map-Reduce job by simply pointing your browser to a URL

Igvita.com has published an interesting way of running Mapreduce jobs:

After several iterations, false starts, and great conversations with Michael Nielsen, a flash of the obvious came: HTTP + Javascript!

What if you could contribute to a computational (Map-Reduce) job by simply pointing your browser to a URL? Surely your social network wouldn't mind opening a background tab to help you crunch a dataset or
two!

Instead of focusing on high-throughput proprietary protocols and high-efficiency data planes to distribute and deliver the data, we could use battle tested solutions: HTTP and your favorite browser. It just so happens that there are more Javascript processors around the world (every browser can run it) than for any other language out there - a perfect data processing platform.

Some really interesting comments in there too. Read full text here.