With web apps, concepts such as "launch" and "beta" are pretty nebulous. Web apps are being improved and changed all the time and it's not clear when you might consider something a "launch" and/or a "beta".

On a related note, what does it mean for a startup to have "failed"? What if the founders make major changes and pursue a different direction? Is that considered a failure? How do you separate one startup attempt from another? Is it even important to do so?

It seems strange that bloggers like to label things like this when it does not even appear necessary or easy.

Fail/succeed is a VERY relative term.

In fact, fail is a very decieving word. I like to classify a lot of my previous sites as failures--but in many ways, considering the small amount of time I put into them and the huge lessons I learned, I can easily consider it a success.

Best way to get blogger coverage is to have something that is focused and highlights your KEY feature. For example, we are a music site so first thing we want to serve is GREAT MUSIC -- NOT social networking features. Now that we have a stable base of users and increasing, we can add more features. If we added those general social networking features at the beginning, it would dilute the main function of the site and be classified as yet another social network.

I suggest you have a launch date. For us it helped us feel internally hyped. It also means you will hold yourself to some quality standard if you do planned releases rather than code as you go. Do few things, do it REALLY well. That is my new mantra - there are so many sites at the moment trying to do so many things at once.

They fail if they lose almost all their users. They also fail if the company goes bankrupt.

Am I close?

What if there's a major change in direction yet they retain some of their users?

Bloggers do need a "hook" or "story" when posting about you, and the easiest one possible is "New Site X Launches".

Strikes me as an odd question though. Why wouldn't you do an official launch?

If the service has been publicly available for a while, an official launch would be at some arbitrary point much as getting rid of "beta" also occurs at an arbitrary point.

probably making something cool that people like is necessary to get popular bloggers to write about you

Yes, but that does not answer my question.