I have an idea

NewsBot · February 16, 2008

From a conversation with Sven:

http://ms-os.com/Themes/AlmostGlass/images/icon-quote.gif

Messenger Conversation wrote:

[David] hey

[sven]* hi

[David] I think I've stumbled upon an idea, can I gauge your opinion?

[sven]* sure

[David] a "Contact Me" service. Say you want someone to email you, but you don't want

them having your email address. So you register with this service which records your

email address, it then gives you a unique URL you can pass to the other person so they

can send you the message via a contact form that URL points to

[sven]* The only problem I see is that those people probably don't want to give their address to your site either.*

[David] not necessarily

[David] say you want people to contact you, but you don't want to put your email address up for fear of spambots

[sven]* What's to prevent spambots (or human spammers) from using your form?

[David] a math captcha

[David] well, for human spammers you would set a "message limit"

[David] so each URL can only be used x number of times

[David] and of course a maximum of n messages per hour

[sven]* In theory it sounds nice, but I have no idea whether people would use that.

[David] I could also put out a javascript which auto-inserts a Contact Me form on someone's website

[David] so people who want "contact me" on their homepages, but don't know PHP or whatever could get it

[sven]* If you do, please make it compatible with XHTML. :)

[David] naturally

I could easily build a service like this in a couple of days, complete with authentic web 2.0-ish look.

But would you use it? What would make you use it?

Oh, and the following are a-given:

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