September 04, 2006

And the rant of the day

BloggerI was missing something: ranting. After this big vaactions I took, I spent a lot of time without saying bad stuff on stuff... It's a kind of an addiction, get it? I even retained myself of talking too much bad about Microsoft at BarCamp, can you imagine? So, I'm back, and since it's quite late I chose an easy-pick.

Now, imagine you have an application called "xpto". You have two versions of it: one is called "xpto beta" and the other only "xpto". What will you guess? Well, if you're not one of those belonging to the "MySpace generation", 10 year-ld kids that only saw "beta" in Web 2.0 apps, you can't miss this: "Xpto beta" was an almost-release yet-buggy version of Xpto, and then, when final and stable "Xpto" came.

What intrigues me is what the hell is happening in Google people's minds: Why, after having Blogger for years, WHY do we have NOW "Blogger Beta"? HELLO?

2 comments:

  1. Yes, it should be "Blogger 2.0 beta", but it isn't. What I don't like in this (ab)use we're seeing nowadays on the "beta" tag is that it turns it meaning into "unstable", when it originaly isn't. It seems that I'm not the only one thinking that this beta thingie is a screw-up.

    You're welcome to this blog, I hope you'll enjoy it!

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  2. I'm using the "beta" here in the tradfitional sense of the word: "A beta version or beta release usually represents the first version of a computer program that implements all features in the initial software requirements specification. It is likely to be unstable but useful for internal demonstrations and previews to select customers, but not yet ready for release."

    The "beta" tag in Web 2.0 applications appeared in the same sense: a "preview" appeared (tagged beta) and then the tag went off when they thought the application was ready for propper "release". You see this done even by Google. What I'm criticizing here is that Blogger didn't went from "Bloggger 1 -> Blogger 2 Beta" or something like that, but from "Blogger -> Blogger Beta", which makes no sense at all if you follow the definition of Beta software.

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