
Welcome To Our Site, Sorry You Can’t Use It - ilamont
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/welcome-to-our-site-sorry-you-cant-use-it/
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marksutherland
I was really hoping I'd get asked to sign-in before I could read that article.

More to the point though, twitter's issues tend not to be the kind of thing
you're looking for in beta testing. You can't test scale with a limited number
of users by defintion. A service which still loses data in corner cases,
exposes private information unintentionally and so on is better off in an
acknowledged private beta than suffering the incredibly bad press and
resentment of users which will arise in these scenarios.

Also, not all software is built equal. Twitter is strongly affected by network
effects, the more people using it, the more valuable it becomes, so getting
people signed up is more important than ironing out every bug. However the
likes of gmail is weakly affected as you can still email all of your mates
whether they use gmail or not. Spotify's value doesn't particularly increase
when new users join it, but it does when it's catalogue is expanded.

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warfangle
Gmail also used invite codes, which - at the beginning - caused false
scarcity, making getting a gmail invite code itself valuable. That's markedly
different than just closing off unapproved signups.

~~~
abstractbill
We did this too, for broadcaster accounts. I was surprised to see a justin.tv
beta code auctioned on ebay at one point!

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jmtame
Not all of us actually want press before we create something usable enough to
get a positive review. I can understand that a writer would want an all access
pass, but to us, these products are our life (or at least a big part of it).
For the people who want to get press, I'll say it's really hard getting on
TechCrunch unless you have invites and a strong product. Usually you need
both, but when you go public expect press to be less interested in general.
Far less interested. They usually want their big story, and then they're
moving on to the next new thing.

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josefresco
People only love the fail whale because they don't see it as often these days.
Sort of like how to look back on old events that may have been painful but
nonetheless provide you a sense of nostalgia.

Also, I find it ironic that this article is hosted by the NYT, who wall off
their own site and force users to give up personal information in order to
access certain content.

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chops
_So here’s a suggestion to sites still hiding behind the beta wall: Throw open
the gates. Get your own Fail Whale ready. And please, let me know when I can
link not to your invite-only beta program, but to your cool, slightly buggy
site available to everyone - now._

This is pretty much exactly what I did when I was starting my website. Instead
of locking everything down, as soon as I had a reasonable working beta, I
opened it up for free to anyone that happened along and wanted to sign up.
Because I didn't advertise, most of those early free signups were either
referrals, or random happenstance.

Personally, I think as soon as you've got a reasonable working beta, you might
as well open it up and let people try it out.

~~~
josefresco
Generally I agree for small startups, but some of these well funded startups
aren't merely thinking about 'surviving', they have their eyes set on 'global
domination' and therefore, a mistimed launch could spell disaster from a PR
standpoint or could tip off another well funded competitor before they are
ready to compete.

~~~
cdr
Do those type of startups exist? Certainly there are people that think a
mistimed launch or tipping off competitors would be a disaster for their site,
but they're probably wrong.

~~~
gaius
Cuil is a particularly good example.

~~~
knightinblue
Cuil had more problems than just 'timing' though. They were trying to be a
google killer. That requires a fundamental paradigm shift which their product
simply wasn't offering.

They could have timed their launch to the precise nanosecond. It still
wouldn't have helped.

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gojomo
It could be interesting to have a presignup for a closed beta, but with a
precise promise of how long it will be before you get in -- like the 'call
hold wait estimate' some phone-in support lines have.

This answers the user concern that the wait might be nothing or forever, and
gives the team another variable to play with to control the rate of signups
and appearance of 'exclusivity'.

Has anyone seen a site that does this?

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PStamatiou
is this the same guy that told me (and all bloggers in general) to stop
blogging, in some snarky Wired article? yup, it is. <http://bit.ly/S85ya>

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bonsaitree
In this article, Mr. Boutin reveals his complete ignorance of systems
engineering. Whether it's websites, software products, cars, blenders, or even
packaged food, pretty-much any remotely novel product marketed and sold for
use by everyday consumers goes through a "private beta" phase to weed out
"bugs" in the system.

I suggest that Mr. Boutin learn a modicum about manufacturing and consumer
product life-cycles before further attempting to practice journalism on the
topic.

The really sad bit is NYT actually paid money for this "content" too.

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paul_houle
The "private beta" is a web 2.0 trope that's going to disappear in web 3.0.
It's something you can afford to do when you've got a rich sugar daddy, but
when you're trying to make a profitable site on your own dime, you've got to
start early.

Yes, I know about the testability problems of community systems -- I've lived
them. Web 3.0 finds answers to them. Web 3.0 succeeds where Web 2.0 failed.

