This is a question more than anything.

Do you think that in an effort to be helpful to the point of removing the need to move a muscle, some developers are creating products simply because they can rather than down to a really identifiable demand in the market?

I’m talking about apps such as Boxcar and Brizzly. These well intentioned little apps that sit on a tablet or smartphone consolidate all our messages into one place. Every message we receive from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin – you name it, oh and of course our normal email accounts too, are lumped into one place and an alert is sent to us to let us know we have something. You can set up rules so that you aren’t overrun by spam and just get sent the stuff you want.

All sounds marvellous – super simple.

But something is worrying me about these. By making things SO simple because we can, what are we gaining? I don’t find it hard to look at email, Facebook, Twitter etc etc, separately but have test driven these messaging clients out of curiosity. I find my self impressed, but left a little cold. In fact I’ve now signed up for several, but still go back to the original – old school!

As I said, this is a question. Does anyone else feel the same way?