I’ve noticed an irritating trend in its apps – the apparent desire of app developers to keep the user in the app for as long as possible. Facebook, Twitter and Flipboard are the worst offenders I’ve seen recently. Every attempt to visit a linked URL opens a WebKit view, but everything stays within the app. UI controls are what the app wants, and you are unable to save bookmarks or otherwise surf the web in the normal way. The user can then choose to open the page in safari – sometimes. Even that can be tricky, as Facebook for a long time was adding an IFRAME to each page, making you click through once you got to Mobile Safari. All so you could add the article to your reading list, Instapaper account, or email it to a friend and not use Facebook’s internal messaging functionality. All of this is maddening.

It reminds me of the horrible ‘news’ sites that break a 600 word article into three pages to maximize the ad views, sites that take an image gallery and make it into a slideshow, or the randomly highlight words and phrases in their content and have all of those links go to other parts of their sites. All of them tend to bury the link to the source material as deep as possible, and those are the times they even bother to link. It’s the Scumbag Steve of SEO, and it is all done with the intention of keeping the user on the site for as long as humanly possible.

Sadly, it seems to be a sustainable business model for some. Facebook is just as popular as ever.