The danger of beta burnout

Stephen Bryant has a good rant about web betas. I agree with his frustration with the wave of too-early betas, but he misses the point when he claims that "The only true beneficiary of a public beta is the company." I think a premature beta is actually quite damaging to the company, because it wastes the small pool of bleeding-edge adopters. This group, made up mostly of bloggers, has the attention span of a gnat. Sure a mention on TechCrunch will cause the site's name to "pop up on tech-related sites across the Net," but that just means that it was a small morsel of blog fodder that briefly passed through the digestive track of the relentless tech blogosphere. Take the example of Eskobo that he cites. The Technorati daily graph shows that after the initial spike coinciding with the TechCrunch post on December 7th interest dropped off significantly.

In Web 1.0 terms premature betas just aren't sticky. When Eskobo is finally ready for users, how will it get these bloggers back? They already wrote about it, so why bother again? In fact, if you skim the Technorati results, you can see that the only notice Eskobo has gotten lately is inclusion in year-end lists, with mostly unfavorable comparisons to its competitors.

This brings up another problem with premature betas, the persistence of negative blog postings in search engines. The adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity was based on a world where newspapers were thrown away at the end of the day and the only thing remaining was mindshare among the public. As long as they knew your name, you could come back and attach new associations later. Now any favorable reviews you can generate once the product is ready for use will always have to compete with the early pans.

I'm in favor of public betas, but launching when you know the user will be disappointed is not a good idea.