

Why do people keep creating small useless apps in the weekend? - umut

Why do people keep creating small useless apps in the weekend for no good reason?
Just out of curiosity...
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aaronpk
This is not new behavior, people have made small useless apps on the weekend
for a long time.

This is, however, the first time it's been possible to get such wide
visibility of these kinds of projects thanks to HN and the rest of the
Internet.

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nilium
Why not? If it's fun and harms no one, I don't see why one shouldn't create
"small useless apps" in her spare time. If anything, you should pat folks like
that on the back for trying new things (assuming they're new to the person
making them).

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revorad
You said it - _just out of curiosity_

Try it sometime. It's fun.

~~~
umut
I am actually, the issue here is not that i don't like these projects, but i
cannot give meaningful feedback on them... When you develop any sufficiently
big project, most of the assumptions and specifications change over time. This
is evolution. And what i criticise is, whether it is a good idea to show a
half-baked app and make people think that it is useless. I believe waiting a
bit more and developing the app and then posting it makes more sense. For all
the learning practices, i agree it is very valuable experience, but just let
them evolve...

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umut
well, my intention was asking why such small things, i think mvp is overrated,
people can put together a meaningful set of features and produce a real
product, probably not in a weekend but in a month or two or six... then it
makes more sense for the audience to check the featureset and give more
meaningful feedback. That's my opinion at least. Don't get me wrong, i
appreciate and support all the efforts by these bright people, but...

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ggalan
who's to judge 'useless'

~~~
umut
No one, actually it's the character limit for the title. :) I didnt mean to be
hostile or disrespectful. I just believe that they need some more time in the
evolution process, make the app better and then ask for feedback, which at
that time more likely to produce more meaningful feedback from the
community...

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victorbstan
It's called 'playing'.

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dylanhassinger
cuz there's good TV on during the week?

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bmelton
Practice? To scratch an itch?

One could argue that Twitter is a 'useless' app that realistically could have
been prototyped over a weekend. I'm not arguing whether it is or isn't, but
it's certainly popular.

My favorite 'weekend' app of the moment is Word Wars[1], which happened to be
built during a hackathon.

I'm putting the finishing touches on "By A Bus", which is a source code escrow
service activated by a dead man's switch that I started tinkering with
yesterday, after reading this HN thread:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3990761>

Why am I doing it? I thought it would be a fairly easy thing that could be
knocked out pretty quickly that would solve the problem of what happens to
source code when their developers die. Source code escrow services are
complicated and expensive, but with "By A Bus", you can just choose to escrow
your Github-hosted source code so that if you die, all (or some of) your
private repositories can be open sourced, or 'willed' to other open source
contributors to take care of.

It is useless? Well, now it certainly is, and even after it launches, it might
still be except to a small percentage of developers. I'll have learned a
little more about the dotcloud infrastructure when it's done, and learned the
GitHub v3 REST API, which I'd never touched before.

This kind of experience isn't exactly groundbreaking, but the more little
things I can touch, the better off overall I am to be able to handle new
things that I haven't seen before, or figure out how 'thing a' will interact
with 'thing b'.

Most importantly though, small things can grow to be bigger things. Twitter
wasn't exactly the hyper-mega trending analytics engine it is today when it
first launched, but it grew into that as its creators realized how people were
using it. Google started out as a search engine, and is now one of the biggest
companies in the world. The best ideas start from small beginnings, and I'd
much rather have a small project that a few hundred people like than a
Facebook-sized project that nobody does, and I'll have wasted a lot less time
in getting there.

[1] - <http://wordwars.clay.io>

~~~
umut
Don't get me wrong, the title is put together because of the character limit.
I truly appreciate and like the idea of putting together bootstrapped apps, i
work for one of those ideas going into maturity, but then don't you think you
lose one silver bullet you have. Other people's feedback is important,
especially on HN, so i was thinking of using it wisely and show them a
developed feature-set, at least some level of maturity. I am sure, twitter's
thing is not the idea of micro blogging and following and such, but rather the
feature set they have put together and served and scaled for the long time
they are alive. Otherwise competition would crush them, remember Google
Buzz...

~~~
bmelton
They exist NOW because of their extended feature set, and that they were able
to monetize all the data they found that they had access to.

They existed originally because they had a dirt-simple microblogging
application that people liked. If they had spent a year developing it and
people didn't like it, they would have wasted that year.

The goal of an MVP is to do exactly what you say is so valuable -- get
customer feedback. If you're solving a problem that people have, it doesn't
matter if your application is ugly or has all the features it might have a
year from now -- it only matters that it exist in whatever minimal form it can
exist in that solves that problem.

If you wanted to compete with Twitter, then yes, you'd have to release a
better product. But then, you're not building an MVP. You're not 'testing the
market'. The point of an MVP is to see whether or not people even want it. To
see if you're actually solving a problem. To see if anyone will pay for it. If
you're testing out a truly new idea, then that's what you need -- to get it in
front of customers ASAP to find out if anyone is willing to pay for or use
your app at all.

Dropbox started out with just a video[1]. No working product whatsoever. He
figured if he could show people what his software aimed to do, then he could
find out if they'd pay for it. The alternative was to spend a year or two
building a product that he couldn't sell. Why waste a year of his life?

[1] - <http://youtu.be/7QmCUDHpNzE>

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tiffani
Learning.

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voxx
attention. notoriety. ad revenue. it's fun. boredom. any of the above.

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far-I
nothing is useless.

