There seems to be a back-and-forth swing of the pendulum on the web as regards where content people create lives. At first, people used static HTML files and managed their websites by hand. Then, we had simple blogging services like Blogger/LJ and your content went on someone else's website. Then, we had MT and Wordpress come along and you could own your content on your own site once more. Now, there's Twitter and Facebook and the like and people are once again putting their stuff on someone else's site.
However, I think there's another shift brewing, as Facebook gets more commercial and Twitter's reliability problems continue, and I think people are going to want to start hosting their own content once more. So how does Movable Type (and Wordpress, for that matter) get in front of this coming shift?
I think the next step is to develop a feed reader that is integrated into MT/WP. It would work a bit like Google Reader, but it would be integrated into your MT installation. Then, when you mark an article you're reading as "starred" or "I like this" or whatever, it automatically creates a new post on your site that is context-aware. So if you "like" a Twitter post you find in your MT feed reader, it gets posted to your site with nice, big text (as individual tweets on Twitter look) and sends a Trackback ping which, if the site accepts it, will link back to your site. In this way, each person can have their "life-stream" (I *hate* that term) on their own site, own their content and maybe leapfrog Facebook and Friendfeed a bit.
Am I crazy?
Reported on Movable Type 4.3
brilliant idea