There was a certain raffish charm in Google's "beta" fetish. Six months ago, nearly half of its products carried the geeky monicker, meaning "not ready for prime time." Google was charging real money for premium versions of some of the products, but most people didn't pay. So whenever the system went down, the company could shrug its shoulders and effectively say, "things happen."

Now Google will have to issue slightly more abject non-apologies. On the bright side, all of those people who have been waiting to adopt GMail once its out of beta can now sign up. Get ready to finally see some "@gmail.com" addresses in your inbox! (Ahem.)

Software makers have standard terms for stuff that isn't ready to sell to customers yet. Distilling the extensive Wikipedia entry to two lines:

• alpha — the first protean, buggy, incomplete version of a program worth test-driving. It has nothing to do with "alpha geek," a self-deprecating pun on alpha male.
• beta — an almost-ready version, shared with customers willing to report the bugs.

Alpha and beta are just Greek for a and b. They were, anyway, until 1994, when Netscape accidentally turned "beta" into a World Wide Web buzzword by giving away over a dozen beta versions of its browsers in three years. For Web hipsters, using Netscape's buggy beta features shifted from an option to a requirement. If you don't remember pounding your keyboard over Finnish sites that locked you out with "go install Netscape 2.0b3," you weren't really there.

Today, beta gets thrown around as a metaphor for "newer" rather than "not ready," applied to amorphous Web content and services rather than precisely numbered computer programs. It's confusing: Is Business 2.0 Beta really next month's print magazine, blogged for factchecking and typos by willing test readers? That'd be even ballsier than the issue they outsourced to India.

If you're not talking software, leave alpha and beta to the twinks who put "2.0" after any slightly changed version of anything. Instead, SVUG recommends these advanced metaphors:

• How's that business plan coming? "I can send you a pre-alpha if you promise not to laugh."
• Is your blog redesign live yet? "I think I've got a release candidate, wanna see?"
• Dude, you're writing for Valleywag 2.0! "Nah, it's more like Valleywag 1.1."

Last night, Google's front-page link to Finance went to a big old 404 message. So the link was taken down, despite scads of blog posts celebrating the new service.

But hey, that's what the beta tag is for. Everything worked by morning, and on opening day, Google Finance ran a victorious headline: "Google Finance launches and Japan beats Cuba." Good job, headline relevancy algorithm. Good job.

Google Finance [Google]

Google admits online stumble [Seattle PI]