What does "beta!" mean?

What does "beta!" mean?

Story by Casey Shultz , Standard-Examiner Web Developer Nerd - Apr 27 2011 - 11:52am

One of my favorite quotes from science fiction is "It has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover," but that's not terribly important right now.

What IS important is that the GO! website, the fantastic online destination you're immersed in right now, is being developed and presented concurrently so you may see things change without notice, and features may appear without provocation and be taken away just as arbitrarily. This is all perfectly normal and should cause no concern. I'm certain, however, that there is at least one aspect of this process of change that you find disturbing, so here is a way to send a message to share your thoughts.

It's not lost on me that this is now the third paragraph and I haven't even started to tell you what a "beta!" is. I should first warn you that the exclamation point was added by Mandi Coleman, the awesome graphic designer of the project.

Coleman said, "Putting 'beta' in between two phrases with large exclamation points made the word seem not as exciting as the others."

Technical folks should already know that releasing a project to the public in an almost-complete stage is an approach that makes development faster and more agile. For the nontechnical people, this means that we are letting you tell us about bugs (we like to call them "unexpected features") and give suggestions about things that can be improved.

By the way, beta is the second letter of the Greek alphabet and means "almost not broken anymore" in computer science circles.

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