stuart test blog

I’ve been playing around with a lot of beta software recently – this also includes beta services that are popping up all the time from the new “Web 2.0” companies. I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen so much beta stuff around at once.

The word beta used to be reserved for pre-release software that had limited distribution to a select group of qualified testers. Today, it’s cool to release beta software and make it available for wide spread use. Google probably started the trend with their various offerings and now everyone has jumped on the band-wagon too.

I guess the appeal to end-users is that they are getting their hands on ‘state of the art’ software, so new it’s not even fully released yet. I’m one of these users too – I love playing around with new software. For the developers of the software, there’s many benefits to releasing beta software – you can test it, break it, spread the word, and take it away again and if anyone complains, just point them back at the Beta disclaimer and say “I told you so.”

Some of the best beta software that I’m using at the moment are all web-based applications. News Alloy is my choice of online RSS/Feed reader at the moment. Flickr is another service that I couldn’t live without – this is also a classic case of an application which really shouldn’t be labelled as Beta.

There’s also a whole heap of other beta stuff that I’m using currently that I’ve yet to make up mind about. I’m testing a bunch of the Windows Live services – Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, Windows One Care Live.

I’m thinking about starting up a new blog dedicated to the beta software around at the moment. If I get time over the next couple of weeks, I’ll put one together – stay tuned…