The Morphic Group

I try to do my part to make gmail more fun. (On the gmail sign in page it does say they're trying to make email more fun.) The trouble with gmail is that most people's gmail addresses are anything but fun. Most gmail addresses are something like fred.williams@gmail.com, whereas hotmail accounts are usually more like sassysinger23@hotmail.com. In order to make gmail more fun and improve its image I sign up for hotmail-style addresses like purplepanda88@gmail.com and snugglyteddy47@gmail.com.

The other day I was signing up for a new gmail account, just filling out the form as usual. I clicked the submit button, and I got an error. Apparently I hadn't typed the correct value for the CAPTCHA field. (In case you're wondering what a CAPTCHA is, it's that image and text input usually with instructions like "type the letters that you see.")  I was puzzled at what had happened. Certainly it couldn't have been BECAUSE THE CAPTCHA WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO READ. I figured that I must have just mistyped.  I tried the new CAPTCHA that gmail provided, certain that I'd gotten it right this time. Again, an error.  It wasn't until about the twentieth CAPTCHA that I was able to eventually create 2hot4u_55@gmail.com.

This got me thinking, though. I see CAPTCHAs everywhere except on The Morphic Group's blog. And if CAPTCHAs are good enough for Google then they are good enough for The Morphic Group. That's why I've decided to add a CAPTCHA to our blog for comments.

I don't actually think the addition of a CAPTCHA will have an effect on comments spam. We've already got the 500 WordPress plugins installed for that, and they work nicely to keep the comments spam to only a few hundred a day. The point is just that people expect a certain user experience these days. If you don't have a CAPTCHA then people will feel that something is missing from their experience on your blog. I wouldn't want anyone to have too easy of a time posting a comment on the blog and feel that they'd had a bad user experience on our site. That's the real reason for adding the CAPTCHA.

We decided to outsource the development of the CAPTCHA system for our blog to a company that says that between their teams in India, China, and somewhere in Brazil they can have developers working 24 hours a day for only 55 cents an hour.  The only trouble is that they only communicate by email, and we can't really understand their emails. We can only understand the part that says "next week, very soon." In the meantime, we did get a comp image from them. We think it looks like it will work great. It seems exactly like the CAPTCHA systems we see on every site, including gmail. This is what it looks like.

Go ahead. Type the letters you see.

Posted in News, Technology, Views

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 11:59 am and is filed under News, Technology, Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.