I always thought betas, unlike alphas, would be feature complete.

No.. that would be Release candidate. Beta generally is "features more or less on place (depending on the number of the beta), with some bughunting required".

(don't take it too serious anyway )

Are you sure? AFAIK it's...

Pre-Alpha: not feature complete, buggy, final feature set not even known
Alpha: not feature complete, buggy
Beta: feature complete, buggy
Gamma (or RC): feature complete, all known bugs fixed (therefore release candidate - if no more bugs are found, it can be released)
Gold: That's it, it made it to final version

Who cares? really?

Used to be, but the internet age redefined it. Many projects use beta to mean alpha now. I think it has to with the stigma of alphas being "unusably buggy" and betas "usably buggy", even though that doesn't need to be the case, and the way features are defined more iteratively now. What's funny is when there are a dozen release candidates or more, each with a few fixes and a few new features. xD

Flickr is "gamma" now. That's the first time I've seen it. Gamma is like getting an "E" on your report card grade. It used to be done a long time ago but kinda pointless so everyone stopped. What I think is hilarious is how companes like Norton bump version numbers like crazy to make it look like they're releasing major updates. Adobe's got some weird dual/triple version number/naming scheme. And then there's the ever popular option of just calling the version the current calendar year + 1.

To each, their own definition, then

How about these... aoTuV always ends up in beta. Never goes to gamma or RC. LAME too.

I thought alphas were for internal testing, betas were for wider testing, and release candidates were good enough for release.

is up to the developer ... for me, till is released, it could add features.