Yesterday a friend asked me a suggestion to quickly put online a form to gather email of people interested in a service he is promoting.
I told him to go with
http://wufoo.com. Or Launchrock, but it's still in private beta. Anyway, my advice was to use something existent and not to reimplement it.
He was a little concerned: "but does the Wufoo logo will appear? Does not people think that if we have to used something like that we will not be able to build the service we are promising to?"
Is that a reasonable concern?
As an engineer and a guy that follows daily the evolution of the web, I think exactly the opposite. People that would reimplement a whole registration mechanism just to gather emails are not good candidate to build software that works and sticks.
Cause they make some basic and common mistakes:
1. reinvent the wheel
2. over-engineering
In using a Wufoo like solution, you prove to know your world, using the right tools for the right purpose and not just reimplement everything with your php/rails-mysql or java-oracle or whatever is your usual development stack over and over again.
Also, as a third bonus point, this is the very basic but indeed important example of what cloud computing means, and what "thinking cloud" means.
