Thankfully the whole mess has been taken under control. Even the oldest browsers in use today have pretty good pop-up protection, saving users from the deluge of “Click the monkey” and “Buy this pack of smileys.”

But pop-ups are coming back.

This time however, they aren’t going to ask you to click a picture of George W Bush, take an IQ test, or play a clicking game. Instead, the pop-ups of 2010 will ask you to join a mailing list. They’ll ask you to follow the author on Twitter.

Imagine if, right now, I took a break from this blog post to ask you to follow me on Twitter. Or if I told you to go check out my other blog on public relations. Would it ruin the flow of the post? Did it?

Worse, imagine it was a pop-up. Not the old kind that browsers easily block, but a Javascript-based pop-up in a lightbox window. Sure, it’s handy if you can’t find a link to the mailing list, or if you didn’t know one existed. But it’s only handy once, and only for a small percentage of users. The absolute worst part of it is that the most annoyed group of users is going to be returning readers.

Many blogs have fallen into this first-party pop-up habit. If you haven’t seen it yet, you will. Soon.

If you’re doing it: Please, please stop. This trend is somehow even more annoying than the pop-ups of yesteryear. It’s a clear example of a trend that might work at first, but then rapidly devolve into something your users find annoying and offensive.