Our team works in Developer Division, under Somasegar. Within our division, we talk about "Community Technology Previews" and "Betas" and "Release Candidates." We rarely talk about "Alphas." But we're different.

When you have a big product like Visual Studio that ships on predictable timelines, you need to have consistent definitions so that customers understand what to expect. A CTP, for example, is basically designed to enable customers to work with a certain feature or set of features -- no gaurantees about quality outside that feature set. A Beta is typically at a higher quality level than a CTP and will work for more complete scenarios.

But Popfly is a web site. We will be updating it every couple of weeks. And right now, there is a long list of thing we want to fix.

So Alpha to us means, "We're working on it, but there will be warts." At some point more things will work the way we want them to work and we'll call it beta. And at some point after that, we'll call it RTM.