RSSBeta, as explained to the masses
By Angela Gunn | Published April 8, 2009, 6:58 AM
Slate this week is belatedly celebrating Gmail's fifth anniversary (April 1) in exactly the proper fashion, asking what the heck beta status even means when it's applied to a service with over 100,000,000 users. The Explainer column gives a safe-for-civilians overview of what "beta" has meant in the past, and dips a toe into more recent philosophical debates ("Beta bad!" "No! Beta good!"). It'll be interesting, of course, to hear the thoughts of our more techish readership: Is years-long beta a subversion of the concept? And are we all relieved that Flickr's "gamma" schtick didn't catch on?
No matter how you dice it, all software is "beta"
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|I've always thought of alpha as where you go
through and correct °you're° °grammer°
°end° your °tlypos° and similar, and beta as
where you fix what brave people say is
broken or °needs made better without
changing much.°
-Big changes being for the next alpha ver.
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|The web is continuously under development, and as a web product getting it into final stage would mean that no more changes would be allowed. they would have to start to develop the upcoming version of Gmail, separating their users from the new beta users to the final users, also, by having a new gmail version would mean that some will prefer the old version, giving the image that the final of the gmail version we are using is less worthy.
We need a new concept of a web product, a "permanently developing" product. no final stage concept. no form-to-reach-and-stop version. the numbers of the versions we are used to, serve as a point of reference when referring to a form of a product, but that creates an unnecessary separation when the first digit changes based on the amount of modifications added. I suggest using the date as a point of reference of a form of a webproduct, like when we refer to a state that a website was on a certain time.
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|For the record, there were gamma versions of software releases going back at least a couple decades. Many companies used to use that designation. I had some on my Commodore 64/128. We just call it a Release Candidate now.
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|I don't care what they call it. It is still the best mail service out there IMO. Live mail and Yahoo mail don't even come close.
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|Gmail can call it Beta, Alpha, Gamma or whatever as long as it works, it's just fine for me. . .
and I think this is how most of the 100,000,000 users feel about it.
(however I like the beta tag in betanews :P)
Score: 2
|I vaguely remember reading that it had to do with legal usage of the name GMail. Something about some company having the name trademarked and google getting around the issue by staying beta status.
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|I thought the only thing that changed there was that UK users are designated @googlemail.com email addresses (but @gmail.com works fine, it DNSs to the same place).
I believe GMail (before Google) was a UK company.
*Edit* It seems several companies and countries have laid claim to gmail
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|Google is adding new features all the time making it effectively in perpetual beta status. Once two months pass without any change, the beta tag will be gone...
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|Beta was made a buzzword by the web 2.0 idiots.
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|huh? "beta" (as it pertains to software) has been around longer than the "web" or the Internet.
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|Internally they are well aware of software development life cycles. This is simply BS from their legal or marketing folks. Nothing to write home about.
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|gmail and its 5 year beta...
kind of silly really lol
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|Well I certainly won't be changing the way in which I use Beta. It's a limited test with end users.
Alpha is an in-house test or a very limited set of end users.
That's my opinion, anyway.
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|I've been programming since 94'ish and I agree Paul... That's been the norm in the programming circles I've been in all these years.
A beta lasting 5 years would normally look bad for a typical programmer. It would mean that either they're lazy, or they should have never came out of the alpha stage.
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