Contactify is a new service to create a simple “Contact Me” form that let’s people send you emails without knowing your email address. Create an account in a few steps and get a URL back that points to the contact form, which contains a captcha to reduce spam. It works well, but it would be nice if they widgetized this to allow people to add it to their MySpace page or blog without sending people off to the Contactify website. There also appears to be no way to turn the form off, so once people know the URL it’s almost as good as having your email address.
The privacy policy for contactify is also too generic. They need to make a statement that emails collected will not be used for any purpose, period.
Definately very useful. But a feature, not something you build an entire company around. Can they even afford to pay the bandwidth costs if this service gets widespread adoption? (they did say the emails will never be used for anything else). Unless there is a revenue model I dont know about.
I think we’ll see Contactify’s features be consumed as a standard feature of other sites. I’d love to see GMail incorporate a feature like this.
is it just me or is techcrunch profiling “start up” apps that have no real potential? i’m personally much more interested in companies that actually have a future.. it seems these days, about 9/10 of the companies profiled on here will be out of business in 6 months max.. it’s the gimmick effect that gets them any exposure.. unless there is something worth profiling, i don’t quite understand why you bother profiling anything..
quality beats quantity..
@ Guatam
Good comment. Web 2.0 gimmicky features tend to generate more press than solid businesses with strong business models.
I run a company, Winzy.com, which I have been trying to get covered on techcrunch for a long time with no luck
. We’re more than a year old, have solid growth, revenues, funding, and are very close to break-even after launching 18 months ago.
We just need to find an angle to get the PR benefit that other companies featured here have.
Since we had a strong revenue model (search), we’ve been able to afford to grow the business and get close to profitable without the benefit of PR, but it’s definitely going to be a focus in the near future.
Sorry, I don’t get the real use of this idea.
Brian.. great self promotion.. very relative to the topic/thread..
Everyone has their own ideas.. this isn’t the place for it.. this is about a specific topic..
Well as to the topic of covering startups, I think that you can’t JUST pick the ones that look like they “have a future”. For one, nobody, not even the great Michael Arrington, has the foresight to know what ideas will be successful and what ideas won’t. Sometimes you have to look at something in an interesting market or that has some kind of actual story to it and put them out there for public discussion. That what they’re supposed to do here, I thought.
As to this specific product, I think it’s another close but not quite. I doubt you’ll be seeing a lot of contactify forms or hearing about them much in the future. But I think this is definttely indicative of a trend.
You are KIDDING ME right? You are reporting on a company that makes a contact form? A contact form that takes 20 minutes to write in PHP and vanilla HTML. How embarrassing.
Save your site and report on companies that are doing interesting s*it. This is certainly not one of them.
No need to redirect through an external service
http://www.tele...s/contact_form/
@Joel
Yes. But it doesn’t take foresight to know that a contact form doesn’t have much of a future. Between this and some of the Silverlight posts…I wonder if people are paying the editors to feature a story.
cool george w bushian name. now if they could only get the commander in chief to be their spokesperson.
W – “you can imagine, chuckle, chuckle, that as the leader of the free world, i have a lot of people that want to contactify me. that is why i use the contactify service so that i can avoid those annoying emails from al franken…”
I have to agree with Daniel…anyone with even mediocre PHP skills can put together a contact form that conceals the destination email address. Plus with a webhost you can then set it up so you can send emails from an email like webmaster@website.com. This seems like a terrible idea for a company/service intending to make a profit.
Daniel and Niraj and Aaron, the form could be marginally handy for website owners who do not have a website that supports ASP, PHP, or Perl. As for those without a website, it’s largely useless as a way to kill incoming spam. Most email programs do allow the user to filter out all incoming mail *except* mail from “message@contactify.com” [the sending address contactify uses]. However, even if all one’s correspondents were to switch to using the contactify link exclusively, there would then be no way to receive subscriptions and other mail not from individuals that one might want to get. So it seems one would still have to check incoming mail as usual. There may be a value outside of websites but I can’t think of any.
I’ve always found that the mailto: pseudo-protocol does this just fine. Maybe I should build a widget around it. Mailto.net and a $650k sale on eBay here I come
Really useful, but yes, a widget would be a fine thing so you can embed it in your blog or the like.
Really useful, started using in my blog.
I have been following techcrunch for almost 6 months now. This seems to be the worst site / business idea you have covered.
It’s all in the name. As has been expressed, it would take literally 20 minutes to write this in PHP and HTML (if you use RoR, you could do it in 10, with fancy AJAX).
But, it’s the name that got it here. The person who made this has taken an incredibly simple little app, given it a short, snappy name and put it on it’s very own domain, of the same name.
This is Web 2.0, and this is why 99% of Web 2.0 companies will fail, because they’re NOT companies. If you think about real companies, with real business models, and real applications, the chances of failure are greatly, greatly reduced.
Do not consider this a Web 2.0 company, for it is not. It’s a quick little program with minimal effort behind it, by a single developer. And that’s not a bad thing – it is what it is, but not a company.
It’s not a company, it’s just a web service. Some of you people need to switch to decaf. And there are a lot of things that novice PHP programmers can do that quite a large percentage of regular web users CAN’T do. Just because something is below your ability threshold, doesn’t mean it is for most people.
This service could easily start dropping text ads at the bottom of every email sent (a la Yahoo). And it wouldn’t take much to be profitable. We’re not talking about major bandwidth here (people aren’t sending large photos through these forms).
Heck, this could be beer money for some developer with a little spare time.
Free beer.
After all the bashing I hate to admit it but I love this type of thing. I am not a programmer so all of these little things make adding basic website features a breeze.
I searched for weeks trying to figure out how to add ratings to my site until someone posted http://js-kit.com/ – ah, what a God-Send!
Maybe TechCrunch should have two classifications: One “for coders” and one “for dumbshits”.
Does anybody know of a simple tool for building a user database and profile editor?
Well, as a sole direction for a business this indeed sounds a bit silly. But think about it: if this catches on and they make a name for themselves doing the contact form, what prevents them from expanding to all sorts of forms/widgets that can be building blocks for a website (created by a non-programmer)
–
We Will Create Your Very Own Domain Name – http://PowerNamer.com
I think what a lot of you guys are missing is that many, many websites are run by NON-technical people that do not understand HTML or PHP or RSS (or any other 3 or 4 letter tech acronym). There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that need the ability to generate leads from their websites and are struggling to do that today since they do not have the technical resources to do it. Easy to use, off the shelf solutions
I am not sure if Contactify will be successful (seems like the functionality is too consumer focused and too limited and I don’t get the revenue model), but I know there is a market for better lead generation and Internet marketing tools for small and medium size businesses that make it simple for a marketing or business person to generate more leads form their website using contact forms that they can configure without any technical skills.
Joe,
If you look at http://www.wyaworks.com you can get WyaWidget and post it on your favorite AJAX desktop (iGoogle, Pageflakes, Netvibes)… create any contact forms (or anything for that matter) you want in minutes and get the code to paste for the form or just the link to the form there. Here is a contact form I created in less than 1 minute in WyaWidget and I’m even able to publish an autogenerated widget to my desktop (and share the widget/gadget/module/flake with anyone) to view when someone enters in something… you can also of course get the entries via rss, email…. and no one clicking the link knows your email address… not sure I understand the depth of contactify, but good luck to them.
http://www.wyaw.../uwa/submit.xsl
I agree with much of the above. I also think this is the kind of widget that the mainstream, non-geek population online quite likes…
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