Also, the TC article mentions that Lyft made an acquihire a while ago of Rover and the Rover team has been working on this feature. So it sounds to me like Uber got wind of Lyft pushing out this feature and stole their thunder with a beta signup page.

Occam's Razor says that both parties developed the feature on their own, without knowing about either party doing it. It's a common "transit" feature that people have done for years—the simplest, most assumption free case dictates that neither "stole" from each other etc, but that they just were doing it because it's obvious.

To be fair, SideCar launched this feature a good deal before either of them.

I believe you, but to be fair, I don't think Occam's Razor applies here.

I agree. Also worth noting the Lyft had a TC article about this. Getting a product and press definitely takes more time and effort than a beta signup.

Considering that Uber is going open beta on the 15th per their blog announcement (11 days away), I would imagine that there is more there than just a blog post.

Or maybe thats the minimum amount of time they need for the service to function and they're planning on working out the kinks later.

I would put my money on this. Back in the early days of social games my company did the same thing - got wind of a Zynga announcement, pre-empt it in the press, and work like hell to get it out. The next two weeks are going to be busy at Uber.

According to the blog post, they're in closed beta right now, so clearly the service functions. I can't talk about the kinks, since I'm not in the beta, but it's out there.

But how do you know it's out there if you haven't seen it? Anyone from the HN crowd has seen this closed beta feature?

I upvoted but want even more attention to this question to see if anyone has actually seen the feature. HN? Bueller? Has anyone seen this feature?

"Closed beta" as in developer testing.

They say it's out there in a blog post, so it must be true.

These types of services just don't get thrown together in a couple of days in reaction to a competitor, they require a lot of work and engineering to implement properly.

I'm sure both Uber and Lyft were aware of this feature being designed by their each and are trying to get their respective features out the door.

Ever notice how AWS and Google release price decreases within the same days? Same thing. They have been told it is upcoming and are doing the same thing. I've seen it personally.

How do they define open beta? Anyone with the app can opt into the beta, or is there some form of filtering out users?

Given Hitch launched months ago I think it's fair to say that the idea of shared rides was out in the open and neither Uber nor Lyft were first on this.