mikepk

mikepk

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15 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - I'm Done With Private ... · 0 replies · +1 points

We had this debate inside Grazr, what does "Beta" mean in the new Web 2.0 world? The truth is, it doesn't mean much. I'm an ex systems / hardware guy and my partner has lots of experience with shipping software during the bits-on-disk days. We put grazr out there as a public alpha initially, then transitioned to beta thinking in the old paradigm of software development. We then removed the beta badge once we thought of it as "release". We even used version numbers when we had major changes, at each major point release we've had a "beta". We think of our current version as a beta of version number 3, but most people don't know what that means. Google set the bar for beta to mean "totally functional except we change things occasionally". Most people looking at web services only have a very general concept of the engineering alpha, beta, release development phases so I suspect that for many, beta just means "it works like gmail".

I had considered writing a blog post on this a long time ago but it never left draft form. The other interesting thing I see is the transition of users mental model of software from something physical. This is directly analogous to the change that occurred for documents on the web. Originally the only mental model was physical paper, so when people had to grapple with the constantly changing, dynamic nature of the web, they resorted to putting "under construction" on every page. Eventually people realized that "under construction" was meaningless, the page is never 'done', and that the medium itself was fluid. I think the same thing is happening with web applications. "Beta" is one way for people to deal with the transition from a static to a dynamic medium for the delivery of functionality.

Another quick point is that I think you're also overlooking what I believe is one of the reasons private betas are in vogue right now, marketing. Creating an artificial sense of scarcity with special passes and only allowing a select few to gain access can generate buzz for a product. Requiring people to ask for "membership to the beta club" also engages them early. Being a data nerd, I'd love to know if this early interaction actually increases the user engagement to the product. Posts like "Anyone have invites for XXX" can in and of themselves pique interest. I think this fad will pass though as people experience private beta fatigue.