Alan Graham on designing for Web 2.0

Alan Graham continues his excellent series on Web 2.0 design strategies for ZDNet. I enjoyed and Dugg his article, but respectfully disagree with one of his conclusions. He noted in Part 1 that architects should avoid the Perpetual Beta:

I like solutions that know where they are going, and get there. Period. It was a clever little marketing ploy using the "beta" phrase once upon a time…now it is just annoying.

This was a major factor in Tim O'Reilly's seminal writing on the topic, which I took at the time, and continue to believe, is about the philosophy of continually improving your software by making rapid modifications and upgades - and being on the web, implementing them instantly in the background and not redeploying.

The open source dictum, "release early and release often" in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, "the perpetual beta," in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It's no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a "Beta"logo for years at a time.

Understood as being a principle of software design and QA, this is critical and can't be dismissed as being a bad thing. I don't believe the "beta" phase should refer to marketing efforts, promotional tactics, or versioning; it's about developing good products that continually get better. The legend of Flickr (re)deploying every 30 minutes is an example.

If hiding beneath the guise of perpetual beta work means making excuses for touting shoddy programs with buggy code that perform poorly, I'm with Alan.