We're deep into the Gnome 2.8 hard code freeze, and I really should be fixing bugs all day... However, I was talking to Joe Orton yesterday about webdav servers, and it made me very exited about a good idea for userlevel filesharing.
So, I spent some hours today hacking up an application that lets you share ~/Public as a webdav folder, using apache running in the desktop session. The webdav server then gets published via mDNS so that it immediately shows up in the "Network" location in Nautilus on all computers on the local network. As a user, all you need to do is to enable file sharing and everything magically works.
Enabling is done via gconf at the moment, although obviously there should be a user interface for this. It needs a user interface to edit the .htaccess file too.
Check out this screenshot from my test machine, showing how the local Public folder (for the gnome user) is shared, and how I'm browsing the share from another machine (alex's public files).