Just got an interesting announcement email from SixApart. They are developing a comprehensive upgrade to the Typepad service, to be launched in 2006, which appears to be centered around adding social features.
From the announcement:
Community Aggregation: Gives you the ability to create individual blogs and share sections of them with other users in an elegant and customizable way.
Multiple Streams: Provides a single place to keep everything that is important to you. A record of your life is created by incorporating streams from various media, like music, photos, videos and other blogs into a single customized blog with an identity of its own.
From this language, it seems like they are going to be using more RSS technology, along with some kind of content management and aggregation features. Additional information gleaned from their site alludes to their learnings from LiveJournal and will include permissions-based content management of some sort.
I've always wanted some aggregation features built into Typepad. It would be nice to be able to hit your own site, see outside content that perhaps you want to comment upon, and begin writing. So your site becomes more than a publishing medium; it's a resource for yourself. Kind of like what's going on with the Backpack site.
