Posts tagged as: beta

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.

Web App or Web Farce?

If you are feeling blue and need a good laugh to brighten your day, try out the beta of Microsoft's Windows Live web-based desktop app. It goes beyond buggy, to a place that can only be called Web farce. Yes, I understand what Beta means, but check out the bugs I was able to find in just a few minutes:

• To test out Windows Live as an RSS reader I imported my feed list as an OPML file. This worked fairly well, except that many of the feeds showed up in the main menu without titles.
• I haven't been able to find any way to tell the system to reload feeds, or to show feeds with new posts.
• When you pull down the menu with the feed list, it covers up about 1/3 of the screen on the left for the menu, even though the menu items take up only half of this space.
• When you click on a feed, only the first 5 items appear, even when there are many more in the feed. The funny part is that the pull-down menu stays down, covering the blog headlines. The only way to clear the menu is to click "hide sidebar."
• Gadgets are supposed to be a big part of Windows Live. These are little tools that you can load onto the home page to display some specialized information. The current beta only lists 5 gadgets: mail, weather, horoscopes, ticking clock, and welcome.Ticking clock is just a text line with the current time, and Welcome is a one screen help page.
• I tried the Weather gadget and entered my city as Lexington, Mass. The gadget displayed the closest weather station in the town of Medford, (I actually thought it was in Bedford, but this is close), but showed the temperature as 17 degrees. A quick check of Weather.com gave the current weather as 27 degrees. Wait. I just reloaded the page again, and now the temperature says 32 degrees. Boston's weather fluctuates, but not that wildly.
• The town name of Medford, Mass. is a link to what I assumed was more details. Unfortunately, the details were about Australia. That's right here's the link.
• Along with gadgets you can also place RSS feeds onto the home page so they display all the time. I tried this with a pre-defined feed from Reuters. This one was really weird. If I continually reload the page, the contents of the feed alternate between today's news and items that are apparently from last summer. The lead headline is "Bush picks Roberts to succeed Rhenquist." Believe me, I'm not creative enough to make this stuff up.
• At the bottom of the screen there are a bunch of links, including Privacy, which has a nonsense link of "http://g.msn.com/0PR_/enau", and Legal, which seems to work,but also shows a confusion over whether I am in Australia. Here is its link: "http://www.live.com/loc/en/au/tou.asp."
• Finally, there is a settings menu item, which doesn't help me refresh the RSS feeds as I hoped, but does give me a choice of nine different languages, including "English (United States)," "English (United Kingdom)," and "English (Australia)." Right now I have it set to Australian English, but it hasn't called me mate yet, or offered to put another shrimp on the barbie, which is the full extent of my Australian English. Wait a minute. Maybe that's why the system thinks I am in Australia. OK. I've switched to good old USA English, and the weather gadget dissapeared. I reloaded it and again put in the city of Lexington, Mass. and this time the gadget can find it, only it is also displaying the weather report for "Novo Cruzeiro, BRA," where it is a delightful 88 degrees. The Lexington link now points to US weather. So it appears that setting the language tells the system to point to that country, which has a curious sort of logic.
• So what happens if I choose Spanish as my language? The weather gadget again clears, but when I enter Lexington, Mass. this time the system again thinks Medford is the closest weather station. Clicking the town name takes me to a weather map for Spain of course. I am speaking Spanish after all.

That's enough fun for now. Boy, it was great to do some Microsoft bashing for a change. I miss them. Next I'll try to find the rest of the Windows Live gadgets. I know there must be more, but I couldn't find any links in this system for them.

Is it art or software?

The Museum of Modern Betas lists dozens of start-up alpha and beta websites for your viewing pleasure. I was planning on studying the new crop of Web 2.0 sites, and now my list is already prepared. Talk about LazyWeb! (via Supr.c.ilio.us)