Arthur Koziel

Web2.0 services spring up like mushrooms nowadays, most users can’t even keep up anymore. In order to stand out from the crowd, services are now going the way of pseudo closed beta.

Do you know these pesky letters which land in your mailbox from time to time, and claim that you were selected to take part in some special lottery? Yeah, I bet you love them as much as I do - a pseudo closed beta is like that.

Instead of sending you spam mails, which will be ignored anyways, new services give away a bunch of invites to tech weblogs that promise to write about the service. For other users, there’s a form on the website in which you can enter your email address and, if you’re lucky, get an invite code.

But here’s the trick: Everyone gets an invite.

Sometime later an email arrives with the invite code in it: This must be your lucky day - you immediately fire up your browser, register and start testing everything out thoroughly.

From the web service’s standpoint, the advantages are simple:

• Users focus on various features and try everything out.
• If something’s wrong, they fill out a bug report.
• Many users trying everything out equals an active community, which attracts other users to join.
• Users blog about the service, giving their readers an “insight-look”.

But would you care that much if it were a open beta?

Published: February 27, 2008 — Tagged: beta, webapps