We don't want to brag or anything but we know we showed you something you've never seen before. We bet you went and told all of your programmer friends about it. It's cool. We're proud of our talents. We're even cool with the fact that you probably went and told your boss you figured that problem out all by yourself. No, no, it's fine, don't worry. We're happy for you. We had a good time too, but there is something that does bother us. We never see you anymore. It's kind of awkward.

We know, we know. You've been busy. You got your projects and the office has been a mad house. We TOTALLY understand. We have stuff going on too. Like we've been wicked busy. It's just that when we don't hear from you we kind of feel used. Sorry. "Used" is too strong of a word. Well it's like this. Even though the role of Blogger has evolved over the years, the stigma of having a high bounce rate still exists. Once word gets out on the street you have a high bounce rate, people have no problem stopping in, getting their answer, and then leaving without so much as a comment.

Oh god. We're sorry. We can see your eyes glossing over. Look, we don't expect you to leave a message on our Facebook or Twitter page every day. We don't expect you to immediately introduce us to your CIO or CTO. We know those are big steps. Don't get us wrong. We have lives of our own and don't want to get tied down either.

All we want is for you to follow us on Twitter or become a fan of our Facebook page and occasionally let us know if you like what we are doing. That's all. Who knows. You might find out we're more than a nice pair of technical tutorials and that we are also interesting and funny.

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.

CAPTCHA

Go ahead. Type the letters you see.

We are really looking to put together something different. One aspect of what we see as different about The Morphic Group is that we see it as a confederation of really great talent, people who do great work and have respect for one another and for our clients. We've all worked at agencies where we were herded along and buffered from clients and never got to take real ownership of the work we did. We were tired of being nothing but cogs in the machine. And we think that there are lots of talented people who feel similarly.

Another thing that we are looking to do differently is how we work with clients. We are all adopters of agile methodologies because we see that they work where waterfall approaches with layers of management don't work. Fundamentally we think that projects succeed more frequently when clients are engaged in meaningful ways, and when clients are product owners responsible for driving the development process. This fosters a sense of teamwork and mutual respect instead of antagonism.

Okay. Enough said for now. We've got plenty of work to do. We'll write again soon.

[Oh, and we have a fancy press release for this announcement too. You can read it at the news room.]