Google has been in questions for putting beta tag in just every product, let it be gmail (to be the first significant one), google calender, gtalk , etc. Just for the readers who are unaware of the term beta, or who never gave attention to that 4 chars word hooked with gmail since last 5 years.
Beta is a phase of software release life cycle. It is a phase when the product is release publically for the usability testing. Yeah you read it right it is release for testing, just before the company launches a final production ready version of the application or software. For all this while you were testing for Gmail or other products and the erros which might have occured were being reported and bugs were getting fixed 🙂
According to Gmail’s official blog, they are ready to rip of the term beta from not gmail but other google labs products as well. After the recent change the way labels used to look and the addition drag & drop of emails to bin, spam and other labels plus folders, they claim gmail is all set to be production ready. Jesus, it took complete 5 years 😀 
Google denied that fact that they are launching any secret service in the gmail for which they had this beta tag all that long. They are simply ready to make it production ready and strip the beta tag, that is it. Some of the features that were implemented in this beta phase were :
- Integrated chat added group chat
- Developed new anti-spam technology
- Expanded to 53 languages
- Mobile app, launched an iPhone UI
- pop3, autoresponder, video chat, and what not !!
But some people are so typical that they still want that greying beta logo back in their mailbox, so for that google has an option enabled with which you can get your beta gmail back in just few seconds, it looks something like this ..
Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla
