ReadWriteWeb

The arms race between spammers, bots and publishers can drive the rest of us crazy too, and nowhere is that more evident than in the often maddening CAPTCHA challenges we have to jump through on many websites. Those squiggly lines run together and are too often impossible to identify. One company in Portland, Oregon believes their system of image based authentication could be used to replace traditional CAPTCHA systems.

Vidoop is a user authentication service provider that emphasizes financial services markets and OpenID. The company's core product lets users log in to sites by entering letters and numbers on top of images in a chart that only a human eye can identify; now Vidoop thinks it can apply the same principle to CAPTCHA. It's an intriguing possibility, as you can see below. It's not without controversy, however.

Yvo Schaap is a 23 year old student in the Netherlands who spends at least some of his time developing ways to visualize information. More specifically, he has been working with the open Twitter API and generating some amazing informatics visuals from the resulting output. Plus, the tools and methods he uses to get the visuals is almost a lesson in new media artistry.

Earlier this week when we wrote about "The Perfect Social Tool," a commenter on the post hinted that a service called Favo may be it. Curious, we went to check it out. Well, Favo may not be the social tool we were dreaming of, but by all appearances, it does look like something we want to try. Although Favo hasn't launched yet, it appears to be an intelligent bookmark manager that could finally have us ending our relationship with delicious for good.