I've not played with it for ages... what are they doing? Trying to integrate everything into a single feed, Twitter Style?
Any ideas if they ever stuck some kind of integrator back-end in the system? I always assumed it was just a client that could speak various forum languages?
But I can see that if they want to stick a back-end in there, add in click-through crap etc then they'll want their own integrated UI. Then they can develop it to various platforms and have a single, common corporate look. Which may be shite.
As Ian and Kevy say, there's a lot of this going on. Sadly, too much of it is based on somebody in marketing, or worse, engineering, saying "I reckon it would be better THIS way" and enforcing their own understandings.
At my work we do an utter shit-load of gathering user data to inform decisions before we decide to fix something that is already working just fine. We can look at REALLY detailed stuff like how many times our users select option x or y, which menus get used most/least, which menus have people driving around looking for stuff... then we can try to float it to the surface. They key question that gets asked for any software product/feature proposal is "What known end-user complaint is this going to fix?"...
...closely followed by "How does it make us money?"
Yes, Strava have been fixing something that worked. Endomondo have too... although I wish they'd directed the effort at their Android Wear app which is execrable. Mind you, a lot of wearable apps are utter shite at the moment: there is a much higher percentage of them that have utterly ignored the "What known end-user complaint is this going to fix?", and that's a statement that is OS agnostic. If I'm honest, the whole wearable market has slightly failed to answer that question.
Having said that, since I had my smart-watch nicked I am kind of missing it...