Looking at some popular web applications like Google Mail (GMail), Last.fm, YouTube etc its easy to see now, why they have millions and millions of users. There some apps which have continuously being  developed or in beta.

Wikipedia: beta version is the first version released outside the organization or community that develops the software, for the purpose of evaluation or real-world black/grey-box testing.

Eg: GMail: 51m users, YouTube.com: Serves more than 100 million videos a day

No good application can be built overnight. The trend (and its advisable) is to release the software as early as possible to your target market. Good book which explains this philosophy in great detail is Getting Real by 37Signals.

It doesn’t necessarily mean you should release your web app in its alpha phase (although many do), the main idea is for the application to be good enough to get something going.

Hey but wouldn’t that scare my users away ?

Not at all quiet the opposite really. If your project has a USP and it really appeals to your target audience they would like to grow with it. They will become real sneezers for your applications. When Gmail was released it had several bugs. Examples of things which did’t work April 2004 (in Gmail):

- international language support for ads
- ads not in navigation when the message is very short but all ads are displayed
- compatibility with more browsers
- option for html/plain text email
- option to insert Signature

Although its value add, interactive Ajax style interface, tagging (labels) options kept everyone hooked. Even if it didn’t work on Safari, IE and several other browsers.

Check out its popularity now! For an application launched less than 4 years ago, as oppose to Microsoft’s 11 years old Hotmail, its very impressive

My Thoughts

My sincere advice to all those currently building an application is not get disappointed when some features aren’t working as well as you would have hoped, instead continuously work on them. Be honest with your users and they will respect you.

Entrepreneur/Organisations behind these website should have that sort of attitude towards their app. Never mind what the tech journalist think of your website, most of them haven’t actually grown their own application. They seem to be brilliant at commenting how horrible an application is. Building a web app is a different ball game, so instead of slashing entrepreneurs and web app developers big them up.

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Tags: WebApplications, Tech Journalist, Bugs, Getting Real