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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

Considering that Uber is going open beta on the 15th per their blog announcement (11 days away), I would imagine that there is more there than just a blog post.

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Or maybe thats the minimum amount of time they need for the service to function and they're planning on working out the kinks later.

I would put my money on this. Back in the early days of social games my company did the same thing - got wind of a Zynga announcement, pre-empt it in the press, and work like hell to get it out. The next two weeks are going to be busy at Uber.

According to the blog post, they're in closed beta right now, so clearly the service functions. I can't talk about the kinks, since I'm not in the beta, but it's out there.

But how do you know it's out there if you haven't seen it? Anyone from the HN crowd has seen this closed beta feature?

I upvoted but want even more attention to this question to see if anyone has actually seen the feature. HN? Bueller? Has anyone seen this feature?

They say it's out there in a blog post, so it must be true.

These types of services just don't get thrown together in a couple of days in reaction to a competitor, they require a lot of work and engineering to implement properly.

I'm sure both Uber and Lyft were aware of this feature being designed by their each and are trying to get their respective features out the door.

Ever notice how AWS and Google release price decreases within the same days? Same thing. They have been told it is upcoming and are doing the same thing. I've seen it personally.

"Closed beta" as in developer testing.

How do they define open beta? Anyone with the app can opt into the beta, or is there some form of filtering out users?

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