"I'm working on it" - Perpetual beta culture

Hopefully by the time you read this post, you won't even notice what has happened. My file-hosting site of choice, MediaMax, decided to cancel its free account options and delete all the files of non-paying users. No good. So I'm moving on, and using zshare, which does not even require you to register...always nice.

I decided I would write a blog, conveying my frustration with MediaMax, and other subscription-only services, and to apologise for the fact that many of the files embedded on this site had disappeared. But I've moved on. I'll be hosting my files elsewhere, and you won't even notice the difference once I change the links. A blog about changes you can't even see is pretty redundant unless you're viewing a cached version of this website. This 'invisible change' got me thinking about the new media concept of perpetual beta.

It only seems appropriate that within our high-speed culture of interconnectedness, convergence and ever-expanding horizons and opportunities - that nothing ever gets done. I see the concept of perpetual beta in two different forms:

1. A creative concept that inspires redaction and communal participation, harnesses collective knowledge and production, and evolves the idea of a palimpsest into a continuous model. And,

2. An opportunity for web-developers to put in a half-arsed effort and not be held responsible.

Important to the concept of perpetual beta, is the term 'artifact'". Axel Bruns, in week 8's lecture, made the distinction between traditional 'products' and 'artefact's' by defining artefact's as "temporary and continually revised" (Bruns, 2008).

Let's look at a couple of websites to illustrate this:

Wikipedia - Wikipedia is never complete. It is, perhaps, the quintessential unfinished artefact. It is not possible, at any given point, to determine all articles as up to date, balanced and fact-based, so it is constantly developing, growing, refining and improving. Wikipedia is documenting history, and thus, can never be 'finished'.

MySpace , Facebook and other social networks can be seen similarly - the content of each page is perennially updated (on some accounts, anyway).

MyLiveSearch - This is the webs' first 'live' search engine (not to be confused with Windows Live, which is not really 'live' at all). The web is searched in real time (real time, as it turns out, is remarkably slow). This is, I suppose, a classic example of a website in the beta stage, as the use of this website currently is more valuable for the host, than the user, while it is undertaking more R&D. I suppose this is a more traditional view of perpetual beta than Wikipedia, Myspace or Facebook, as it is the technology, primarily, which is in development, not so much the content (That is, of course, not to say that the technology and systems behind Wikipedia, Myspace and Facebook are not constantly changing, or that the content of MyLiveSearch is by any means static!).

OzPolitics Political Inclinations Test - This is a great site where your answers to 50 questions are compared to the positions of the major Australian electoral parties. I voted accordingly. But, in what I can only see as an attempt to excuse themselves from errors, inconsistencies and out of date information, the test as been in 'beta' form for far too long, without any obvious changes being made. Throughout the entire 2007 election campaign, and ever since, the site has been in beta mode (I'll leave you to draw your own inferences on the political back peddling that is likely a contributor to the unfinished nature of the test).

And then of course there are sites such as YouTube and CCmixter, which facilitate as well as cater for social networking around the perpetual process of redaction.

Open Source software is another domain which is inherently 'incomplete'. And as Axel Bruns points out, much of open source developers' focus in the current new media environment is on creating, "tools and processes for user-led content creation" (2006, 2) - in fact, the very act of produsage, could be described as a form of open source content creation. Bruns defines produsage in similar terms, "The collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement" (2006, 3).

And of course, in a blog regarding the re-use of content on the Internet, I could not fail to mention the role of Creative Commons licensing, without which, much Open Source programming and artistic redaction would not be possible.

Anyway, should you want to read more about perpetual beta, check out Rex Cristostomo's post, and an excellent article by Collin Douma on the Canadian Marketing Association's website about why perpetual beta means Web2.1, web3.0 etc, are redundant terms (Douma, 2007). Definitely worth a look.

References:

Bruns, A. 2006. Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation. http://snurb.info/files/Produsage%20(Creativity%20and%20Cognition%202007).pdf (accessed April 20, 2008)

Douma, C. 2007. Why there will never be a Web3.0. Canadian Marketing Association. http://www.canadianmarketingblog.com/archives/2007/03/why_there_will_never_be_a_web_1.html (accessed April 24, 2008).