So many times this. You'd think the bounce rate for something like this has to be around 95%. Either way, I didn't bother and anyone who values their time wouldn't either.

This strategy of collecting email addresses without delivering anything first never seems to die down.

The reason is simple: it works. Many people will hand over their email address with no guarantee of anything in return. A shockingly large number of people will do that. And then the opt-in spam begins. It's a never ending email campaign for who knows what. Does the spam work? Surprisingly, yes. Enough to be worth paying to keep sending it out. Legalised spam.

Is an email address worth something? Gather enough of them and yes, absolutely it is.

This is all pure speculation. Or is it?

If I had a dime for every site that collects email addresses without delivering anything first...

As if Mozilla didn't have enough data about users already.

Anyway, if you wanna see what this thing is here you go:

http://github.com/mozilla/napkin/zipball/master

Unzip the file and start reading.

I noticed a comment in another story earlier today that it's a kind of call-to-action, which apparently is getting more popular. But then again, so is overlay pleading in general. "Shut up and give me your email address."

As a quick overview, Napkin is a wireframing tool inspired by Balsamiq, Mockingbird, and Axure. It allows you to quickly mock up individual pages, known as screens, by means of a drag-and-drop interface. What sets it apart from the competition is its interactions. Rather than creating a prototype and telling others where a certain link leads to or that some page requires authentication, you can directly show them. The elements that you can add to a page have these interactions built in, and you can see them in action when you preview a given screen. When you're done working, you can export a whole project to a node.js express application as a baseline starting point for development.

Napkin was created as a Mozilla summer intern project. You can find a presentation about it at http://ventures.karthikv.net/napkin/

Yep, closed the window as soon as I saw that.

Yes, it would be better to let you use the site as a guest, and then require signing in only to save your work.

But I’m glad they use BrowserID for sign-in, at least. Since I was already signed in to BrowserID, the actual sign-in was super easy – a pop-up window opened, I clicked one button, and I was in.

myemailaddress@mailinator.com

Gets you a peek and provides them with useless data. I think it's a fair trade.

Visited page. Couldn't get in. I left. No idea what Napkin does.