Hey, Google. Isn’t it about time to take that silly little word BETA out of your Gmail logo? Don’t your users– and, I’m just guessing here– number in the tens of millions, and aren’t you only like the richest and fastest-growing corporation on the planet, and don’t you have Bill Gates lying awake every night in a cold sweat? So, time to stand behind the quality of your product. My grampa uses Gmail. It’s gone past the “testing” phase, seriously.

And you, Yahoo!. So, you bought this funny little photo sharing site from some guys in Vancouver. And sure, there were some small bugs. And they warned people of this by pointing out that the site was still in BETA. But, most of your users now are actually paying a small hunk of change to use this service, and you, while no Google, are certainly pretty freakin’ far from a small handful of hackers in a rented office somewhere in Vancouver. So, get with the program already and stop charging people money for something that you proudly claim is only half-baked.

Friendster, I had words for you, but now I see that you’ve actually graduated from BETA status into full-fledged, grown up, mature website product. And for that, I congratulate you.

And audible.com, I’m sorry, but you can’t just go back into BETA after eight years on the web. It just doesn’t work that way.  That’s like me saying I’m 26.

And to Fotolog, Vimeo, Last.fm, and all the other genuinely small, indie, ingenious, punk-rock sites on the web: thank you for not throwing some silly word around like it’s the new Internet AIDS ribbon.

Anyone spot any other egregious misuses of the word BETA?