Before I explain the quotation marks, an announcement: there’s actually something at our website now. The beginnings of the restaurant functions are online, and available for our users to kick around. If you already have a login from our feedback application, that works for the new site.
If you don’t have a login, you can still click around some, but to really get involved (for example, to post reviews or link your friends) you’ll want to register. Right now, we’re manually approving registrations to control access to the site, but you should get an activation email within a few hours.
Now, why I put quotes around the “beta” in the title. It’s not too hard to click some “Web 2.0″ sites and find that silly little word floating around the logo somewhere—Gmail, actually, is still “beta” according to their logo, although there are probably a million plus people using it as their primary email reader. Some web developers put a “beta” badge on their site like a reflex, without thinking about it; it’s just a design element to them.
“Beta,” when the term was originally used in this context, meant, “this is likely to break somewhere.” It meant, “We don’t claim this work is ready for wide consumption.” Beta software was usually limited to a controlled pool of testers outside the development team. (Alpha software went to an even smaller pool of testers, almost always insiders, who were willing to watch it crash often.) The whole point of putting software through a “beta” phase was to find problems, so they could be fixed.”
“Web 2.0″, mostly following Google’s lead, made something of a joke of those old conventions. Web apps have spent years in “beta” (e.g. Gmail) and Flickr even rolled itself into a “Gamma” stage, presumably tongue-in-cheek.
Maybe I’m just an old web curmudgeon, but this isn’t what I have in mind when I say “Beta.” This new use of the “beta” label is just like the old “Under Construction” graphics that used to litter sites in the mid-1990s. Those graphics became a sign of the times as soon as people figured out that websites are almost always under construction; if they’re not seeing at least regular revision, they’re probably past their shelf life. So I’ve taught myself to see a “Beta” label as being a bit declassé: everyone knows that websites are always under development.
So I’ve been resisting putting “Beta” on the site. If we do put on such a label (we might,) I’ll be lobbying to remove it as soon as possible.
Right now, though, we are very much in a stage where the site is changing rapidly. We appreciate you checking it out and letting us know what you think, both positive and negative. At this stage, we’re mucking with the code on an hourly basis, so although it’s clear where we’re going now, what you tell us really does steer the way the site grows.
[...] not “done” in any sense, but most of the major pieces are in place. We’ve taken the “beta” phrase off the logo on the site, which means we’re not planning on removing anything big without [...]