I really wish I could bring myself to sit down and read, but if its not in my feed reader (or Hacker News), then I'm probably not going to read it.
I've always had quite a short attention span and when I sit down, open a book and start reading, within five minutes I'm thinking of everything else I could be doing instead of sitting there doing virtually nothing.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't consider reading to be doing nothing, but it just feels that way while I'm doing it... so I have to stop and go do something else.
I have countless programming books and a lot of Terry Pratchett Discworld novels... and when I can get over my attention span, I'll hopefully sit down and read.
How do you mean why do you have to login? It's just a little to-do app, like Remember the Milk or Tada List. You sign up, log in and start adding things you want to remember. Keeps things private.
I only built it for myself and haven't actually told anyone about it until I pasted a link here in the last comment. Thoughts and comments are welcome! :)
I wouldn't call what I'm doing much of a web app (http://scribbleit.net), but I wanted to learn some basic PHP so I decided to create a to-do list app (wow, new idea huh?) because I hate all the alternatives out there.
I had just finished hacking a bunch of PHP scripts to get all the functionality and then a friend of mine said, "Hey, I actually want to use this... if I could make an iPhone app for it!"
Long story even longer (sorry), I've started implementing an API just because I think it's the right thing to do. It's allowing me to understand my application a bit better and proving to be a great learning point for me.
In generality, I can only see an API introduced early as a major advantage. It can give you a direction for your design and future development. Oh, yeah, and the purpose of the API .. it will allow people to interact with your application in ways you possibly didn't imagine; there'll always be someone out there who would be interested in playing about with it!