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

This is not new behavior, people have made small useless apps on the weekend for a long time.<p>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.

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).

You said it - <i>just out of curiosity</i><p>Try it sometime. It's fun.

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...

who's to judge 'useless'

It's called 'playing'.

cuz there's good TV on during the week?

Practice? To scratch an itch?<p>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.<p>My favorite 'weekend' app of the moment is Word Wars[1], which happened to be built during a hackathon.<p>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: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3990761" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3990761</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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'.<p>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.<p>[1] - <a href="http://wordwars.clay.io" rel="nofollow">http://wordwars.clay.io</a>

Learning.

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

nothing is useless.