Dear Large Websites

When you make improvements and updates, why don't you just... update the whole site. What's the point of slowly rolling out updates to different people at different times? It doesn't make any sense. I understand testing things with small groups, but this isn't just a "testing phase" on a small group, and then update everyone. This is just randomly giving it out to a few new people everyday. It's INCREDIBLY frustrating.

Doesn't this create problems for you? Having multiple versions of your site must create issues sometimes when people on different version attempt to interact with one another. What's the benefit here? How is this a good idea in any way? Isn't it a lot more work to do the crazy, complicated process of slowly updating people?

Usually it'll be over the course of a few days, and that's a mild annoyance but whatever. Well sometimes it takes longer than that. I actually am currently worried that due to some strange glitch, I might be stuck never getting some updates. The layout of Google as a whole (the area at the top that is pretty much the same across all of their products) changed, and it has now been at LEAST like two or three weeks since people started getting the new layout, and it still hasn't changed for me. At the same time, youtube has gotten a whole redesign, and I don't have that one either. However, if I log in via a different browser (or in incognito mode, I use Chrome by the way), I get youtube's new layout. I logged in, played with some stuff, not sure how I feel about the changes but I could see it. Back in my normal browser though, it kicked me back to the old layout! Facebook ALSO is getting a re-design, which I of course can't see. Their adding the timeline thing, and this has some privacy implications. I was reading an article on Lifehacker about how this makes it much easier for people to see old posts, so you should consider making sure you don't have any old posts you don't want people to be able to find. Luckily, you can see your timeline now but they won't be publicly viewable for about a week. Well it's been about a week and I still can't see my own timeline. Can other people see mine? Can others see stuff of mine that I can't yet get to so I can't control?

Plus, on top of all that, I just like new things. I'm sure plenty of other people like new things too. Some of us want to be able to see and play around with new updates as soon as possible, and hanging them over our heads for WEEKS is just not cool.

So please, update everyone at once, or at least within a day.
-SF