How useful is your website?

The other day I was surfing the Internet and ran across a website that touted itself as an amazing answer to the age-old problem of how to tell people you had your baby. I stared at the website for a full five minutes before I finally said out loud (to myself, no less) “Is this really necessary?”

Baby Notify allows you to set up an email list ahead of time and will send out a gender-specified email to your list when you’re ready to tell the world. You can also send out a Twitter update and a Facebook posting and they have apps for Android and Apple so you can use this service, apparently, in the delivery room.

This leads me to two important points: 1) Can’t we just email people? Or post our own updates? How much work is this actually cutting out? 2) Is this something that has to go out immediately?

Perhaps I’m cynical, but I could honestly do without the constant (and mostly inane) Facebook updates I see every day. As someone who is pregnant, and will have to notify close friends and family about the little one’s arrival, I will have my husband call those who need to be informed, and the rest of “social media friends” will find out in due time.

This leads me to an important point – with the amount of websites in existence, and the numerous ones popping up each day, how useful is your website? Are you solving a problem that needs to be solved? Or are you adding to this inane Internet chatter? In this case, it appears as though Baby Notify may just be adding chatter rather than useful information. The most important thing is to provide a useful service to those who need it. Before you create something, if it crucial to identify is there is a market for your product to exist in.

So, perhaps I shouldn’t blame the website. I went into this thinking that there were too many extraneous sites out there, but obviously, this site exists because there is a demand for it – or at least the creators thinks so. Only time will tell if this site finds a following and becomes successful, or fades into the background. In the meantime, perhaps we should all stop and reconsider whether what we’re putting out there is useful information, or useless chatter.  Perhaps we should all take a deep breath and relax before we act…. and for those who can’t, there’s probably a website for that.