It appears that the MSN 8.5 Beta Program will be starting up soon. Early Wednesday morning, a large number of MSN subscribers received an e-mail message:
Dear Customer,At MSN®, we"re continually striving to build a better service for our customers. As part of this effort, we"re excited to announce our new MSN Beta program and would like to extend this invitation to you, one of our valued MSN Internet Service members, to be a potential beta participant. The feedback from beta participants is extremely valuable in helping us define the features for future releases of MSN products and services.
What is it?
A beta program allows us to test a new version of a product with a small group of customers before the final version is released. Feedback from beta program participants enables us to continue to make MSN more useful. This particular beta program is for the next release of MSN 8 Internet Services.
The goal of the beta program
MSN uses beta programs such as this one to help us understand what works for the customer and what does not work. We"ll use your feedback to help us make MSN Internet Services easier to use and to improve functionality. Additionally, if you have feedback on how a specific feature works or how you think it should work, we"ll take that feedback into consideration for future releases of MSN Internet Services. During the beta period, we"ll communicate with participants periodically to request that they try certain features and provide feedback on their experiences.
The full e-mail contains a link to BetaPlace where you can fill out a survey (this is a little different than signing up through betareq@microsoft.com) and it appears that subscribers over the age of 19 are receiving this.
To sign up go to Betaplace and sign in using Guest ID MSN85Beta