Constant software updates remind us that we are all works in progress
Unless you work in or around web software development, the phrase "perpetual beta" probably sounds rather cryptic. But the term, first coined as a derisory reference to the habit of major software houses such as Google avoiding "finishing" their products, has begun to take on its own nobility.
Software engineers borrow their release-cycle terminology from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Once a program is written, it is said to be in alpha, and will remain in the hands of those who wrote it while it undergoes a first round of testing. Then, when major bugs in the code have been identified and fixed, it is released into the semi-wild as a "beta". A community of trusted users who had no hand in the programming will be invited to use the new code, and to report breaks and other issues back to the engineers.
Until recently, this so-called beta test group stage was followed by the official release of the software. But that practice is gradually changing, as many developers of web applications such as the photo-sharing site Flickr, the social bookmarking system del.icio.us, or Google's email service Gmail have released "beta" versions to a much wider community of general users, and kept the software in its beta version, if not perpetually, then at least for years at a time.
"Perpetual beta" has thus emerged as a state of mind. As the Google philosophy supposedly goes, why tell your customers a product is finished when they might very well tell you how it could work better? Perpetual beta, as well as being a convenient apology for bugs and glitches (the BBC has recently justified its exclusion of Mac and Linux users from its on-demand TV service the iPlayer by claiming that "it's in beta"), invites your users to become co-developers.
And if this rhetoric sounds a little icky, consider it in the wider context of computer technologies. What are security patches and automatic software updates but admissions that the software you're running on your personal computer needs improving from time to time? What is the invitation to "have your say" or, indeed, "post your comment" beneath the online treatises of venerable old publications, other than an admission that what emanates from the editorial desk may not quite be the finished article?
Perpetual beta says we work best working together and we're all allowed to make mistakes. Perhaps the prime minister of 20 years from now, confronted with a compromising photo downloaded from a forgotten Facebook cache, might reassure her doubting electorate with the words: "I was in beta." Indeed, contrary to the neo-Luddite myth that advances in computer technology are dehumanising, the idea of perpetual beta allows us to imagine that, in the future, we might all be a little more forgiving of human failure, and understand that perfection is an iterative process.
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