So what are captcha’s? What’s the purpose of a captcha’s? Captcha’s are those little images that contain a combination of phrases, letters and/or digits. They are used on comment and contact forms on the web to prevent spambots from submitting spam comments. They work because they require human input and someone with eyes that can read the characters on the image. A spambot will not be able to see the image.

I do most of my web development with ASP.NET (C#) because its the environment I find myself in at work and admittedly its an easier environment to develop in than say a Linux or BSD environment. Ease of use in this instance might have a price in terms of hardcore performance but it has a pay-off when it comes to development speed. The server controls that come shipped standard Visual Studio 2005 make it quite easy to have a basic website with basic data controls up and running in a few minutes. The server controls take care of all the processing for you, and all you have to do to use them is drag them onto a form, set a few attributes and voila. Even Visual Web Developer (free download) comes packed with all the tools to get a small data-driven website up and running in no time.

Web 2.0 is a marketer’s catch phrase, I am sure of this. Marketing people might be inclined to use any catch phrase to promote a service or product, if it can draw the customer’s attention. Realistically though they have to realise that Web 2.0 is just a catch phrase, nothing more, in my honest opinion. The technologies that drive Web 2.0 are not so new that they have been re-invented. Social networking forms a part of the whole Web 2.0 theme of which Facebook and MySpace are popular examples. Both of these Social Networking platforms offer an API (Application User Interface) which allow developers to tap into the resources provided by each. The only reason people would want to tap into such a resource is because of the database of users that use that particular network, no other reason. If I developed a Social Networking website and I developed an API for that website and my website had 30 users as opposed to the millions of users that Facebook has, then its obvious to guess where someone might want to invest their time.