When will Snitter be Beta?
When will Snitter be moved from Alpha status to Beta status? Is it just me, or does Snitter seem stable enough to be considered a Beta quality product?
Granted, Jonathan Snook’s handy little widget isn’t all that old, but it isn’t like he’s designing a MMORPG that will require years of development. So, you tell me…should Snitter still be an Alpha?
on November 16th, 2007 at 8:38 am
I agree, Snitter seems at least Beta-worthy. However, it might not be the quality of the product, but the quantity of features to implement that is keep it in Alpha status. If Snook’s got a lot of features yet to put in there, then I could see keeping it Alpha.
Let’s not forget, too, that Adobe AIR is still Beta. Maybe that’s why he considers Snitter to be Alpha, because it relies on a foundation that is still beta?
One really does wonder, though, how much of the Beta status in these things is honesty or truth-in-advertising, and how much is just Web 2.0 hype.
on November 17th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
It’s a couple things that have stopped me from really calling it “beta”. The first is the number of features. There’s plenty more functionality that I want to cram into this thing and at various points, I’ve reworked stuff which has introduced a chunk of new bugs (v.018 to v.020 was a prime example of this).
It also doesn’t help that I’m building on top of two moving targets: AIR and Twitter.
When AIR gets closer to a final release and I get closer to settling down on the feature set, I’ll probably consider it “beta” but it’s all really just a word. There’s plenty of cool stuff that I want to do so definitely stick around.