Right now, somewhere in Austin, Texas, someone is getting excited about the new app they’ve just downloaded. They will be bragging to people that it’s the ‘new Twitter’, or that it’s made Foursquare redundant.

Thousands of people are currently attending Austin’s annual South By Southwest (SXSW) festival. As discussed here, developers are launching their applications at the festival, just as Twitter and Foursquare did before them. From reading the article and the descriptions of the most popular apps though, I’m not convinced. There’s Scvngr (why has removing vowels suddenly become good? I had to check several times I was spelling it right), which is basically Foursquare with games, Instagram, a photo-based Twitter, and Hashable, the only really new idea, but what is effectively a pushy virtual business-card. These apps just sound like extensions of what’s already about, and what’s already popular.

I realise that I don’t have a ground-breaking app idea myself, and so I don’t have that much room to criticise someone else’s business, but I can’t see much need for these apps. Apart from anything, they (and Scvngr in-particular) seem to be just trying to distract us. But distract us from what? Is there not enough to enjoy in real life that we need apps to set us challenges whenever we step into a cafe? I can see the relevance in Hashable, allowing you to create new business opportunities for yourself, but is it genuinely something you couldn’t do without? I can also see how Twitter is useful, and I always have it open when online, but is a Twitter-like app based around pictures really that useful? You can already post pictures to Twitter, so what’s the problem?

Maybe they’re things you need to use to be able to understand, but right now they just seem like they’re there to make the developers money. Or have I completely missed the point?