People on-line seem to have a...need to give their opinion regardless of whether it's relevant or not.

I see this particularly in the tech world where a new product gets announced and someone who wouldn't even use the program feels the need to comment "I wouldn't use that."  Whenever I see that, and it's often, my initial thought is, "Well who cares?"

I just don't get it. I have no use for greeting card making programs, for example. When I see a news item about one, my first thought isn't to jump in and say "I wouldn't use it."

This really came to a head today over at WinCustomize. Adam and I want to write a little freeware program that can sit in your system tray and send to a server the names of the skins and themes you're using on your system. Users who use it can then go to a special page and find the most popular skins that are in actual active user and if the database can match the skin name with one in the WinCustomize library, it'll provide a link to download it. Other features could include displaying links to popular customizing programs (basically we would put a list of all the customization programs we're aware of in a database and every time there's a match it would increment a counter). Then anything that's reasonably popular could be brought to the user's attention.

In short, it's a form of spyware. Except we would be very upfront about it. It's basically Alexa for skinning. The user provides information to the community on what skins and skinning apps they have and in return they gain access to the results of that data. There's no ulterior motive. It basically boils down to people who want to know what the most popular skins IN USE are and get them. Not everyone trusts download counts and really, the ultimate recommendation for skins is what people are using.  Just so that we're up front about it, I want to call it SkinSpy. 

So I wrote a post asking for additional features people who would USE it would want. I explicitly stated that some people would not want to use this program if they're uncomfortable with a program reporting what skin or theme they're using. The system doesn't track users or anything. I.e. it doesn't know who you are, just what skin User X is using. 

But most of the responses were from people who don't want such a program or think such a program is a bad idea. Again: Who cares? If you don't want it, don't download it and use it when it comes out. No one hates Spyware more than I do. I've written on it countless times. But good grief, I'm not paranoid about it. As long as I know what data is being sent and how it's being used I don't care. I run Alexa  -- happily because it tells me how popular a given website is in return. Oh no, Amazon.com knows what sites I visit.

But people just seem to have a reflexive need to give input even when it's not asked for or relevant.