Robert Gremillion 02 Dec 05

Does this mean I should be ashamed of having the BETA tag above my logo?

Or that I should now ADD the BETA tag so my site has a chance of getting listed there…

Rimantas 02 Dec 05

“BETA” is a must have for any Web2.0 webapplication.
That should be documented.

Emily 02 Dec 05

Ha Ha!!!!!

Makes it even more obvious - only the truly good and truly helpful will survive!

Timing helps too….

Unrelated.... 02 Dec 05

Sorry for the unrelated comment, but thought it was strange you seem to have lost 250 readers overnight based on your feedburner stats on the right. is that normal??

JF 02 Dec 05

The feedstats are based on how many unique people ping the RSS feed in the trailing 24 hours. So someone can still be subscribed, but if they were out of town or turned their reader off for a day it can affect the stats. It often fluctuates by a few hundred every day.

andy 02 Dec 05

Why not just say ‘hey, this is a full release … it may have bugs, but we’ll fix them as we go’ instead of hiding behind the beta wall. Some of these companies need to go back to school and study their sdlc (software development lifecycle). The problem is they are trying to push something out so fast, they dont have time to do their own unit testing and just hand it over to the users and call it beta.

Jason — your team has never done this … what do you think about it ?

JF 02 Dec 05

What do I think about public betas? I think they are ridiculous.

If the public is using your product it’s a RELEASE, not a beta. Slapping the Beta label on something only absolves the host company of responsibility when things go wrong. “Oops, thanks! We’re in beta so…”

Things will go wrong in alpha, beta, release, v2.0, etc. Everything is in a constant state of flux. Release, improve. Release, improve. Constantly. But don’t call something beta if everyone can use it.

nb 02 Dec 05

Anyone else notice that the “next page” arrow on that site points to the left? Human factors nightmare.

BTW, I agree with JF, if it is available to anyone in the public to use, it isn’t in Beta. Pretty soon, the only way to be in the cool-crowd is going to be releasing an “Alpha” as a final product.

Adam 02 Dec 05

If the public is using your product it�s a RELEASE, not a beta. Slapping the Beta label on something only absolves the host company of responsibility when things go wrong. �Oops, thanks! We�re in beta so��

Well, come on. If you work for an a-hole company or are a a-hole yourself that may be the reason you designate something as BETA.

There are no better ways to test an app then to have the public tear it apart. Granted, you try to get as many bugs out as possible. However, I believe that half of the reason of designating an app as BETA is to let the user know that they may run into errors/bugs, and also providing a simple method to notify the developer of those errors.

I am curious how 37s tested their apps. Care to give some insight? Did you just hand it out to a few people and ask them to test it? Perhaps the apps were simple enough that you were able to have a large amount of confidence releasing the to the public BETA-less? Or did you just fix and update the program as complaints came in?

Been enjoying the post-shark post blog.

Don Wilson 02 Dec 05

This “public beta” business is getting to the level of annoyance as the “Under Construction” messages with flashing lights and yellow tape on the AOL/Tripod homepages.

A Noonie Moose 09 Dec 05

http://www.solargarlic.com/archives/2005_08.html

That was posted in August and only Odeo has finally removed the beta tag (though one would wonder if it would’ve happened without the NYT article…)