stuff is cool

Ever since Google’s GMail public beta made such a huge splash, it seems that every Web2.0 product to come out these days decided to follow suit, releasing their product while in the “beta” stages.

Now, a quick recap for those of you who don’t know about the terminology. The first three letters of the Greek alpha bet are alpha, beta, and gamma (in that order). In software development, there’s a convention that something that’s mostly-functional, but not quite tested enough or feature-complete enough to be ready to release is considered “beta” software. Consequently, something that shades more towards “production-ready” is considered “gamma” — that would mean that it mostly just needs more testing and sprucing up, most functionality is already in place and tested fairly well. Likewise, something leaning towards the opposite side is “alpha” — something you probably don’t want the general public banging on as it’s not really well tested and may not even be very representative of what you envision the final product to be. I’ve never seen anything (publicly) labeled “delta”, because putting together a “gamma” release is rare enough; at that point, it’s done.

Now, the idea of having public betas isn’t something Google spearheaded, but they certainly did add a new responsibility-dodging wrinkle to it. Releasing beta software may have been old hat, because most software up to now was just something you either purchased or downloaded, so your copy didn’t change. However, now with online services like GMail, things change without the user doing anything. That means that, ostensibly, things are getting fixed and that they are polishing things up a bit more … you know, heading from beta to gamma to “finished”. But therein lies the wrinkle. GMail’s more than a year older, and hundreds of thousands of users stronger now since it’s initial public beta release in early 2005. But what do we still see up in the top left corner?

This:

And it’s not like they’ve forgotten that it said beta in the logo, because that “+ talk” feature was added just a few months ago, and the actual mail functionality hasn’t changed much since then. So, at this rate it seems like it’ll be stuck in perpetual beta.

Now, here’s a quick rundown of some other Web2.0 applications that are following suit (mostly stolen from this list):

- purchased by Yahoo! in March of 2005, up until recently Flickr was just “beta” but it was “upgraded” on May 16th according to the Wikipedia article on it.

- one of the many web calendar options out there, 30boxes has been around only since about February of this year, so I won’t harp on them just yet about remaining beta

- Writely was actually purchased by Google though there’s no telling whether or not the “beta” label was there before-hand, since I never use it

- Google’s social networking site was actually developed in the spare time of one of their developers … back in January 2004. It was in beta then, and it’s apparently in beta now. I haven’t been back there in a long time (probably about two years!) so I can’t say how much has changed, but I don’t hear Orkut making huge waves in the social networking space.

- EditGrid does one thing that none of the others in this list do (that I can tell) — they actually have a release plan. Not only that they have a Roadmap/Future Plan.

- now here’s one case that having the “beta” in your logo is probably a Bad Thing(tm). You expect people to give you their credit card information even though your product is admittedly not ready for general release yet? I’ll wait a while, thanks.

- I don’t quite get how Jellyfish works, but it’s something like an exclusive cashback club plus price search engine. I couldn’t successfully sign up, (”Application Error (Rails)”), so it definitely is still beta!

- Zillow’s fun to play with (when it’s working, duhh beta), check out how much houses in your area sell for

- lastly we have an “alpha” entry! This one’s a bit more understandable, since it’s still quite new and it’s a pretty complex product. If you’ve ever wanted to roll your AIM/ICQ/MSN accounts together into one interface without having to deal with Trillian, Miranda, or Gaim, try this