GMail turn 5 - still BETA??? Colnect will not follow.

Gmail's official blog announced that Gmail celebrates it's 5th birthday. 5 years is not a short amount of time. However, GMail is still in BETA. It seems that Google has changed the common meaning of "BETA" from "publicly available product about to go fully public when final fixes and additions are made" into "fully fledged public product that is expected to sometimes fail and we won't take responsibility for it when it does".
Google even created the 'beta' mark trend in logos of companies and services.

I personally find it rediculous and unfair to the customers. Of course products sometimes fail but we cannot abuse the term "BETA" for 5 (FIVE!!!) years.

Colnect has been marked as beta for less than 6 months since it went public before all key features were ready and prior to proper testing. Raising a site from grass-roots up is not a simple task. However, as of today, since Colnect is relatively stable and many of its key features (a lot more is to come but I'll elaborate on that another time) are ready and publicly available, the BETA mark will be removed.
Yes, my system may sometimes fail. Yes, it's not as perfect as I'd like it to be. However, it's public, it's working, it makes many people using it happy so it's not a beta anymore.

Gmail: back to the future

The following post has nothing to do with this blog but it's just something amusing I've recently seen while using my GMail. After sending a message, it tells me my message has been sent -1 minutes ago. Are they trying to say it will be sent in 1 minute? Is it yet another bug in Gmail?


Here's the attached picture. My interface is in Spanish so "minutos antes" means "minutes ago".