The perpetual beta and buzz building...
So, maybe I was a little hasty thinking (just a little bit) that the measuremap beta was more marketing than pragmatic demand throttling. This from Adaptive Path's Jeffrey Veen:
"When we started planning for the launch of Measure Map, we spent a lot of time trying to estimate how it would scale. As a hosted statistics service, we would be offering to track our customer's stats as the traffic happens. In other words, every time you get a visitor, we get one too. Not an impossible task, but one that would require some careful capacity planning. The last thing we wanted was to cripple under an initial wave of popularity."
One of the key, almost mistakes I made this year with a client' web app was only running a 'beta' for bugfixes, not worrying about a trial for assessing user's interactions and behaviours.
As it happened, we did go into an extended trial as a last minute decision by the client and I - as well as lots of tiny bugs that crept out and missed in the 2 week beta, we were able to refine the functionality even more and were hit with a few real life scenarios that we couldn't have anticipated...constant iteration over a trial period works.
And it was a cultural trial as well, as the application had some significant social implications to the workplace it was introduced - the trial allowed my client to learn about the right way to implement the tool and market it effectively etc.
Lessons learned, as the US Army is wont to say.
