Upgrades and the Beta Issue

I’m not sure if the Riya team has made any drastic upgrades to the servers that host them, but Riya is significantly faster now than it was even two weeks ago.  Tara has promised that there’s some cool stuff coming down the pipe for the next alpha release, and I’m guessing that some of that venture capital money went to upgrading the servers and putting a big, fat pipe behind this thing.  Good call, team.

I’m not sure if they’re going to keep the Alpha tag when they release the unrestricted demo at DEMO next month, or if they’re going to move it into beta status.  Personally, I’m growing tired of seeing new services have “COOL NEW SERVICE” and then “beta” in small caps in the logo.  It was cool at first, but now it seems more like the trendy thing to do instead of an actual project status.  For example, how in the WORLD is Flickr STILL in beta?  You’d think that a service that’s been around for two years AND been purchased by Yahoo would be able to move past the beta stage at some point.  I’d caution the Riya team to not fall into that trap; they should keep an unrestricted alpha series open to the public while also undergoing true beta testing with a core team, and when it’s ready, release version 1.0 to the public.  At that point in time, I think people are going to be as sick of seeing “beta” attached to everything as I am and would much rather see “version 1″ than another Web 2.0 service desperately trying to look like everything else that’s popular.  I know I’d be much more forgiving of a product if you didn’t have “beta” attached to your app, because beta doesn’t really mean beta anymore — it’s just the trendy thing to do.