One of the things I like most about Kickstarter is having the "activity feed" of friends who have funded other projects. I'm sure there's a way to recreate that without having the restrictive ToS kickstarter has, though, or it could be solved by publishing "I've funded this" to twitter/fb/etc.

I'm not so sure. This seems like a brilliant idea for projects that can successfully generate their own hype and buzz (as Soylent did through HN before launching their campaign), but that may not work for Joe Everyman who has a cool idea that they want to fund. Kickstarter provides an aggregation of fundable ideas in one place for curious people to browse.

It's similar to what you see with musicians and comedians. Radiohead and Louis C.K. can probably host and fund their own releases/campaigns easily, but your average local band probably doesn't have sufficient reach.

Edited for grammer/typos

Reward based crowdfunding will become a payments/distribution mechanism for an already engaged audience rather than a free source of money for people with an idea and no way to execute on it.