Article: MSN Messenger BETA

A BETA version is simply a test-version of an application, a game, a homepage or something that will be released later but needs testing first. If you are programming an application, there will most likely be lots of bugs that you need to discover when they will occur and such. So the developers of the product need to find those bugs and remove them from the final release version of the product. Well then you might think that the programmers could look for their own bugs and remove them by themselves, while this is true that they could do, it's not very cost-effective for a company to pay programmers to just use a program trying to find bugs which doesn't require any programming skills, so they would rather have some other people (called BETA-testers), to the looking for them. Some BETA-tests are more dedicated and could have payment for the BETA-tester, but some are public so everyone who wants to help out with finding the bugs, can do it. A perk for the BETA-testers is of course that they will get to use the program before everyone else has a chance.