Against Sticky Websites and the Facebook Timeline Rollout

Someone said today on GooglePlus that, in spite of all the hostility and backlash toward Facebook's rolling out their intrusive, invasive, non-permission based Timeline and Ticker garbage, at least these nefarious, diabolical spyware gimmicks might increase the "stickiness" of Facebook.

Facebook is a Web Disease. A minefield of rogue apps, malware, phishing exploits, spammy game invites, stalkers, predators, and identity theft. Who wants that mess to be sticking like bad gum on the shoes of your web surfing?

Web users have tasks to accomplish. They are not seeking sites that hold them, imprison them, confine or corral them like cattle, detaining them needlessly. They don't want to spend a lot of time on any website. They want to get something done, then go elsewhere. Website design should facilitate this.

The concepts of "stickiness" and "sticky websites" is a horrible, old fashioned, outmoded concept. It hearkens back to the Web 1.0 days when all you could do is stare at a web page and maybe buy some junk. There was little to no interaction. Companies didn't want to listen to any input, suggestions, questions, complaints, or feedback from customers. They had a message to shout at you and products to sell. They cared about nothing else.

They wanted their ecommerce or corporate fluff sites to be "sticky", meaning you were stuck there, like in a trap, even though it was mostly irrelevant, boring, and We-oriented.

But the purpose of web design is to help the user ignore most of the content, to zero in, to focus on what is immediately relevant, a piece of information, a task, a tool that meets a current need -- and then move on to other things.

"Welcome to our website!!! Look around, enjoy yourself, hang out." was the stupid message that greeted users on old fashioned corporate fluff websites. Sometimes they even disabled the Back button, to force people to "stick around" like they had nothing better to do.

If Facebook is hoping that the Frictionless (non-permissive, invasive) Sharing of the Timeline and Ticker are going to keep people on Facebook longer, luxuriating in all the idiotic trivia of other people's every move and motion, they're dead wrong.

The new Timeline and Ticker are designed to collect more data, to track your every move on the internet, and then sell that information to advertisers and organizations who will use it to exploit you.

These gimmicks are some of the last, desperate gasps of a dying and rotten web platform, a social media that is really a surveillance trap.

We will be so happy when Facebook finally dies and disappears off the face of the internet.

Long live GooglePlus.