In the heady buzz of Web 2.0 we're being flooded with developmental versions of so much. I'm typing this in IE7, people can reach me on Live Messenger or Live Mail but if nobody wants to talk I'm sure I'll find something to do in one of my Live Favourites. In truth I'm enjoying Live-ing. And that's just one group of the pre-release stuff I'm playing with these days.

Of course there's always been previews and betas before but what seems different these days is that stuff tends to work. In fact, often things seem to work pretty well. Most of the previews I'm running are actually better than their officially released alternatives. It's confusing.

Of course end-products like software is one thing, but when you're playing with software libraries which have big Danger signs plastered all over them and you find they actually work better than pretty much everything else it's just depressing. Especially when the library isn't feature complete. So now I have to decide whether to actually wait for them to add the features I want or make my own and accept that when the official version appears I'm going to replacing all my hard work. A sane person would simply ignore something this early in development, but then sane people won't find out how good it is for a long time yet.

The moral of this story? Forget the hype of sneak previews and ignore the perpetual Google beta - there's a lot of genuine stuff out there, and some of it is really worth finding.