β

I want to talk a little bit about the word Beta this morning. The letter Beta (β) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet, coming immediately after Alpha (α).  According to Wikipedia, the Beta is used throughout mathematics and science, but it is the usage in reference to software releases that has caught my ire today.

It seems to me that the word beta, or the implied phrase beta testing has been completely thrown out the window in the Web 2.0 age.  I'm pretty sure that Google, with its perpetually-beta GMail, Google Calendar, and menagerie of other web services has changed the definition of the term.  It no longer means "Software that is in testing in preparation for release."  Beta now means "Released software that may not be production quality."

This is a subtle but important distinction.  The first phrase implies that the company is actively seeking to purge the bugs from their system and create a production quality program. The second is simply a CYA, removing any kind of perceived liability from the developer in case it doesn't work right.

I ran into a Type 2 beta website last night, and I am still pretty aggravated about my experience.  I have a bunch of MTG cards and I want a way to organize them electronically.  I can use the MTGO client, but it's graphical only and proprietary.  A few weeks ago I saw a link to this site, VoidSlime, which is supposed to be a trading marketplace for MTG cards. It's in Beta, of course, but I figured I would give it a shot.

During my "testing" of their site, I found a show-stopper bug: You can't have a regular card and a foil card of the same type.  They obviously are only keying on the card ID, instead of both the card ID and all of the special flags (foil, promotional, etc).  Moreover, the software doesn't tell you that it failed to add the card ... it simply adds it to the fancy Web 2.0 auto-list and keeps going. It's not until you refresh the page that you realize your cards are missing from the database.

As a developer, I understand that software has bugs, and while I was frustrated by 'losing' some of the cards I'd just input, it's not that big of a deal.  What is a big deal, however, is that there is no way to report bugs on this site.

No email address
No message boards
No "contact us" web form

Since there is no way to report feedback, it can't be in testing, and thus the word Beta on the VoidSlime home page simply means, "This software sucks. "  I would write the website owners to have them add an email address, but that is kind of paradoxical. Instead I'll just publish this post and maybe someday they'll see it.

- Anyone can write a web page but it takes someone special to build an application.