Wednesday, December 20

Branding the Captcha

I really dig Seth's idea for a centralized Captcha server everyone could use for free. His monetization suggestion of "Type the brand you see above, please" has lots of potential in its simplicity.
There could be conflict of interests, like being shown a NetSuite's ad whilst signing up for a Salesforce service.

Very juicy and thought-provoking, in typical Seth fashion.

Update: it didn't take too long to see this one implemented: cool, online demo here.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The idea of Seth has been developed. Take a look at ModernCaptcha - when captcha meets usability

Unknown said...

The link you submitted is broken. I'd be very keen on seeing that devolepment, if you could kindly repost; Googling for Modern Captcha returns no meaningful results.

Anonymous said...

Hi Mayor,

Google is not so fast with blogs. Here the link again: http://www.cclair.nl/blog/category/moderncaptcha/moderncaptcha-when-captcha-meets-usability/

Unknown said...

Thanks for the link -really cool demo and usability improvement: radio-boxes are quicker than typing!
Cheers
j

Anonymous said...

Seth later qualified his idea as intentionally inane on another blog (http://razor.dbkconsultants.com/2006/12/01/seth-godins-stupid-idea/) and the ModernCaptcha idea has been thoroughly trashed on Digg (http://digg.com/programming/ModernCaptcha_when_captcha_meets_usability).

Unknown said...

I did indeed read Seth's comments you linked to, and also his follow-up linking proudly to the implementation, which makes me more inclined to think of "naive" rather than "inane" idea.
The comments on Digg are, for the most part, critical of the implementation -with which I would agree.
I still think it could be a step on a different, perhaps better direction. Mind you, it only takes a little bit of noise or perturbation to break most OCR systems.
There can be other ways of improving the experimental implementation (encoding the logo name strings, displaying a set of images one of which is a logo and asking "In what place is the Amazon logo?", etc...)
All in all, I still like the concept.