Dear FedEx,
The lovely country selector you’ve implemented is broken. See, not everyone has the Arial font (yes, I use Linux, and Arial is a proprietary Windows font, so I’m out of luck there). This causes my browser to choose a different font that happens to be slightly larger than Arial. What happens next, is that the selection box doesn’t fit in the container you’ve made for it, and it gets hidden behind the map.

Oh, the map. Let’s click on that. So I did, and then the country selector for North America has a similar issue.

Ah, but I’m resourceful, and notice the link at the bottom that says, “If you are having trouble viewing this page, click here.” I’m from the United States, and it defaults to that since I’ve already tried North America from the map on the original page. Fantastic, except that there is no submit button, because your web designers were too smart for that, and made the page accept whatever value is chosen, except that you can’t select United States when it’s already selected.

Since I’d like to be able to use your website, I decided to try and give you some feedback. However, there’s no readily apparent way to do so. So I clicked the Customer Support link. I particularly like the part on the Customer Support page that says, “Just e-mail, write or call us at 1.800.GoFedEx 1.800.463.3339.” Hmm, I can call that, but I’m not sure how to send email to your phone, or especially how to get postal mail to your phone. I do realise that if I keep going down the page, I will find ‘Call or Write Us’ links for each department. If I’m lucky, I’ll pick a department that has an email address listed. But if I pick the relevant one (FedEx Ground), I’m out of luck right there.
All that to say, please fix your website so that I (and the growing number of linux users) can use it. Lest you think I’m a nut on the fringe, think of all the poor netbook users running Linux that can’t use your web site. Think of them, and repent of your ways…

Respectfully Yours,
Dissatisfied Customer

Earlier, I was reading how Facebook almost bought out Twitter. I know I’ve seen some people adamantly proclaim ‘Facebook is not Twitter’. Sure, but have you looked at the two side by side? Facebook is organized tweets. That said, I’m still not quite sure how it makes sense for Facebook to acquire Twitter, except that they can expand their already-established advertising network to another venue.
Otherwise, it seems a bit random for one social network to acquire something they already have. It makes even less sense when you look at how poorly run Twitter is. It seems like everytime I go to check on twitter, it’s broken in some way or another (like right now). Not that my preferred micro-blogging tool is perfect, but at least identi.ca is open-source, and that counts for quite a bit. I’ve also never seen it completely down like Twitter is right now, and it integrates nicely with Facebook status updates. Just in case you’re totally hooked on Twitter, Identi.ca even will cross-post to Twitter as well.