I’m looking at the Obvious blog, the company behind twitter and found an interesting article about the woes involved with the introduction of a new “feature” into an existing system.  

His solution is an “Opt-Out” setting that the user can use to revert back to pre-feature version.   This is basically version control for the user.   

Goldman discusses the difficulty of coming up with a name for the opt-out setting which is basically asking:  “Did our feature break your stuff?”

Personally, I think that is a great label.

The problem is of course that after X new features, you have a possible X! situtations to test and accommodate for.   That’s a lot.   10 opt-outs = 10! scenarios = 3628800 scenarios.   Well, in that case, let’s just force it on the user and say screw those 800X600 users and those Apple Safari users and eventually those IE7 users.

And it is all very relevant given Gmail’s recent update and their decision to offer an “Older Version” link.  

This version control may be the best method to get new releases to production, part of the perpetual beta philosophy that Google had taken on GMail.  From a user’s point of view, what are the differences in the new Gmail version? 

System messages are no longer in Times New Roman?   ….I’m kidding, contacts are much improved.

Read on… http://blog.obvious.com/2007/02/enable-float-alignment.html