“Beta” is short for “BETrAying”. It means the web site isn’t honest to you about the benefits for you, what they are doing with the data or what they are telling you.

Examples:

  • Download services: ‘all download slots are busy, please wait 15 seconds’ - not true, but they just would like you to look at the ads for 15 seconds
  • Social networking: Myspace claims “foo is in your extended network”. Even when you are the Google robot or using an anonymizer. This is a hard-coded string, not a calculated connection.
  • Most Web 2.0 services: we have no idea how to continue providing this service for free once our venture capital is used up.

So spelled out it would be like:

Sorry, we’re not telling you the truth about our service and the benefits, and that’s why we’re calling the service beta; once we’ve found out how to do it right and still earn some money with it, we’ll remove the beta sign.