Google news is no longer in beta |
And Matt Cutts blogs about it: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-news-leaving-beta/ |
Strange, yesterday I was thinking about this. News come after gmail- yet gmail is still beta!! |
Every good website should be an eternal beta :)
I think the Google "In Beta" and "Out of Beta" is a PR campaign.
While still in beta, they have an excuse for errors, to shield against certain negative write-ups.
When going out of beta, they get another free round of PR for basically doing nothing except removing 20 pixels in a logo.
I don't believe the "Beta" is any meaningful indicator of the program's status/ stability. Take Google News, which has been running fine for years even with the Beta. Take Google Analytics, which is out of Beta yet has been running sloppy, and currently lacks features it had in the beginning. Thanks to Google et al, the word "Beta" has lost any meaning as indicator that it might have had. Maybe people will start to use "Alpha" now if they're serious about it... :) |
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5571590.html
"It's kind of an arbitrary thing," Page said. "We could take beta off all of our products tomorrow, and we wouldn't actually have accomplished anything...If it's on there for five years because we think we're going to make major changes for five years, that's fine. It's really a messaging and branding thing."
Google's beta time frames represent one of the most dramatic expansions yet for a process that until recently was used as an opportunity to discover fatal flaws and make final touch-ups in advance of a product's full public release.
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