Market researchers for websites don’t research the market any more. They research the competition in order to figure out how to imitate it. LiveJournal is making its site more Facebook-like in spite of nearly unanimous disapproval in the comments. WordPress has been infected with the same desire to imitate the “social media” sites. It’s implemented “infinite scrolling” of blog pages, making footers impossible and the question of whether something is on the current page ambiguous. If you try to get to the WordPress home page (www.wordpress.com), you can’t; you’re automatically redirected to your statistics page.
If I’m checking my spam list and happen to bring the mouse cursor over the icon of one of the spammers, a preview of the spammer’s page pops up. Because it’s “cool,” not because anyone in the world wants it to.
Is it only a matter of time before WordPress starts delivering RSS feeds out of sequence and arbitrarily leaving out some posts? I hope not.
Mad File Format Science 