"Stickiness" has become the Holy Grail for Web sites these days, but think about the term for a second. What image does it evoke? Not a pleasant one. For me, stickiness conjures up flies on flypaper, their wings beating furiously in a futile attempt to escape.

"Dot-com" ventures that worship stickiness treat customers like lobsters. The companies try to entice customers into a trap, drop a locked door behind them, and start the water boiling.

But this approach shows a fundamental disrespect for customers. Even worse, it won’t work, for a whole host of reasons:

 Many companies try to collect a lot of information on customers and their buying histories so that switching costs will be high—in other words, so customers won’t take the trouble to educate some competitor about themselves. But most companies don’t know much about their customers just yet.

Some companies, such as Amazon.com, are the equivalent of smart salesmen, suggesting things a customer might buy based on what he bought before. But, if a customer is going to stick with you through thick and thin, you need to be more like a doctor or lawyer. And very few companies can yet handle the data mining they’d need to do to turn their Web sites into trusted, long-term advisers.

In any case, the costs of pulling away from a sticky site and switching to a new e-commerce site are modest in comparison with the opportunity costs—in other words, the pain a customer would feel if he couldn’t participate in the innovative opportunities that will appear on the Internet in coming years.

 Information is becoming more portable. Already, services can store personal information, such as a credit-card number, and plug that information into forms on the Web with a single click. Venture capitalists are financing "infomediaries," which will let customers build profiles of themselves by, among other things, keeping records of their transactions. In other words, customers will own their own data. You won’t. And they can take the information anywhere.

 Customers are becoming more portable, as they grow more sophisticated. Younger users, especially, value the openness and freedom of the Internet because they’ve grown up with it. They resist being stuck. And new services quickly spread information on cooler sites, lower prices, and better deals. New pricing models such as auctions and demand aggregation (bringing in groups of buyers to get lower prices) defy attempts to build closed e-commerce environments.

 Even communities are becoming more portable. Although America Online has proved to be sticky because users don’t want to leave chat-room friends behind, services such as Gooey may change that. Gooey, a free software product, bills itself as "chat on every Web site" and may lead to communities that rove from site to site.

 Sticky companies may be publicly flogged. Look what happened when AOL kept users of its popular "instant messaging" service from being reached by users of similar services. (Instant-message users are notified when friends are on-line and can send e-mail that immediately pops up on their screens.) Even Microsoft—which isn’t exactly known for cooperating—managed to shame AOL for blocking users of Microsoft’s network. AOL will have to give in eventually, anyway, because its users want to communicate as widely as possible.

Rather than rely on stickiness, it would be much better to start preparing now for the day when adhesives no longer work. The Internet should be about enabling community and drawing customers in by offering real value, especially the value being supplied by the customers themselves. Offer customers a platform that is open and can expand quickly to accommodate more functions, and give them a big say in its development. Surely, this will help you keep your visitors and customers at your site better than any number of cheap contrivances.

David Ogilvy, the advertising pioneer who died this year, used to belittle the condescending ads of the 1950s by declaring, "The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife." He then launched a wave of ads that treated consumers as halfway intelligent and had great success. It’s time for dot-com companies to make that same conceptual leap. Let’s at least progress beyond the thinking of the ’50s.