Four years after the service opened to the public, popular web-based task manager Remember The Milk is finally out of beta. What does that mean? Nothing really.

The company isn't going to start charging for access to its core services. And the developers aren't done adding and refining features. It's just that after four years, the Remember The Milk team decided the product was probably robust enough to remove the beta label... you know, kind of like Google did with Gmail not too long ago.

Of course, companies like Google and Remember the Milk have stretched the meaning of the beta label beyond any semblance of recognition. Once upon a time, if you were using a beta product you knew it was a pre-release version that hadn't been extensively tested and which may be unstable. These days, alpha is kind of the new beta, although some companies still release public and private beta versions of software that are still untested and unstable. Since there's no regulator tasked with enforcing alpha, beta, and other labeling rules, the words have kind of lost their meaning.

Still, congratulations to the Remember the Milk team on reaching four years!