I’m interested in switching away from Cingular wireless, so today I went to verizon.com to look for some info on their wireless plans. Clicking the Wireless link on the home page brought me to this page, which tells me to go to www.verizonwireless.com to learn about Verizon’s wireless offerings. But when I clicked the link to verizonwireless.com, it popped up a new window instead of taking me directly there. They’re using target=”_blank”. Thank you, Verizon, for keeping me from foolishly leaving verizon.com. After all, verizonwireless.com is a different site, and apparently the concept of a link to anywhere outside verizon.com makes Verizon a little uncomfortable. They’re willing to acknowledge that under certain circumstances a person might wish to have a second site up in their browser in addition to verizon.com, but they certainly aren’t going to facilitate anyone’s leaving verizon.com (even when the destination is another Verizon site).
It’s a little thing, but it’s a telling example of the kind of cluelessness and lack of attention to detail that seems to characterize phone companies.
Fettig wrote a book on Twisted, a networking framework written in python.