The biggest indictment of Branch to me is that since they alpha/beta/gamma/episilon-launched months and months ago, no one I come across in my Twitter feed, Tumblr feed, RSS nor anywhere else uses it; it's something that seems deeply embedded in a Valley bubble. I am also dead-tired of promotional videos that in vague terms and promises make it sound like we're curing cancer.
The number of tools intended to "enhance conversation" are a dime a dozen, but fair or not, I think there is something to be said for traction and widespread use, even though it may seem like a chicken-and-egg problem.
If blogs and online publishers wanted to use the format, they would want to put it on their website directly for the ads, hits, and audience interaction, but Storify already accomplishes this to a large extent (barring any shut-down by Twitter).
It reminds me of the whole ~~social media~~ web 2.0 craze way back when.
There is also something weird about inviting people to listen in on a pseudo-private conversation. It makes it very artificial and staged somehow.
But hey, the logo is pretty cool. Probably one of my favourites out there.
+++
EDIT: If I were Branch, instead of promoting it as something generally applicable, which it is not, I would promote it as something targeting more niche purposes where it makes sense to use it and grow it from there and let people discover utilities slowly.
Another way to promote and develop it is as a GroupMe for Twitter, which by now is its own type of communication. As an addition to DMs and @mentions in your Twitter bar, you now have branches of conversations defined by the topic or group of people.
That kind of integration would probably lead to a Twitter acquisition, but that can't be the worst thing to happen to a company anyway ...
---
The impression their website leaves users with is that this is something aimed specifically at self-important boffins and "thought leaders" - bloggers in realms Apple, tech, and Awl-ish dabblings. Exclusive online punditry circlejerk, essentially. The Davos of social media.
It just reinforces the idea that I am never going to use this, because let's be honest, I am not important/well-connected enough to get asked to join anyone's conversation - and I don't want to spam people just to try the thing out. It's as if it is a recursive start-up which has created a tool designed to let users talk about the start-up.
They should call themselves Recursive Corp instead of Obvious Corp, because it seems to have based its entire philosophy on its Valley-esque self-importance and -indulgence.
> There is also something weird about inviting people to listen in on a pseudo-private conversation. It makes it very artificial and staged somehow.
Agree. What if they were actually private conversations, but with the same model of inviting people in?
I thought of Branch recently when I was reading the intro of Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"[1]. He mentions that before the internet, technology only enabled two-way, one-to-one communication (telephone, telegraph) and one-way, one-to-many communication (newspapers, radio, TV). The pattern of many-to-many, starting with BBSes in the 70s and becoming fully ubiquitous only now with Facebook, is new.
It got me thinking about how the many-to-many communication models online don't match those we have offline. When you have many-to-many communication offline, you sit down at a table with a small group of friends, family, or colleagues. Everyone at the table can listen and speak. People can leave, or new people can be invited to join. And the group is an ad-hoc one, formed for the conversation, which doesn't persist after the conversation is over.
There's no form of online conversation that has these characteristics — no remotely mainstream one, anyway. And Branch is interesting to me because it's sort of trying to tackle that, except by allowing everyone in the world to read the conversations (or "listen"), they turned it into something completely different.
I don't think many-to-many communication online is a solved problem. We may still see new, better models that will displace the current ones.
I tried it out a few months back when I had an interesting exchange on Twitter with Jason Evanish (@Evanish). Check it out here: http://branch.com/b/who-will-pave-the-way-for-future-human-s.... Being able to import our back and forth on Twitter into a discussion was pretty slick since Twitter isn't very good at managing a back and forth when another person wants to get involved.
Everything seemed cool up until that point. I then invited some folks who I thought might want to chat about and have something to say on the subject matter, a couple of my co-founders and Hiten Shah who works with Jason. The invitation process seemed so spammy to me though. It sent a Twitter @ mention to everyone and without any context, it just felt forced. A few people asked to join the conversation and I approved them in order to see if we could get something going, but none of them ever responded at all.
Perhaps if I had a larger network of people in the know about Branch it would've worked better. I definitely like the idea of it and the execution is close, in my opinion.
"and I don't want to spam people just to try the thing out".
Branch is really close to being really useful. They just need to make it for the everyday person the way HN/Reddit is without loosing the "Davos of Social Media" elements.
When I launched http://throwww.com a while ago, people on HN/Twitter were telling me it's like Branch. I didn't know what Branch exactly was then, and now that I see it, I still don't get what it is. It doesn't seem at all like throwww though. Nice looking interface, anyway.
It's a solution to a problem that nobody has. Reminds me of Google Wave, but less useful.
That might be a little too negative, my initial impression of this is that whatever small amount of utility it may actually give just isn't that interesting or different from what we already use.
I had no idea either. And then I clicked on "What do you like about Reddit?" and it said it ended in August 2012 which had me even more confused.
But after clicking around I worked it out. It was an elitist (and far less useful) version of Quora. Or was it simply a polished discussion board. Then I clicked the About Branch button and realised it was more about the Twitter integration than anything.
IMHO: Try and clarify what this is on the home page. "A new way to talk to each other." is contrived, meaningless and simply not true. It's not new, it's better.
The initial flashy transitions that are happening are seriously slowly the overall page load. I don't know why intro/index pages do this so often. It just deters me from going further into the app. That said, it's a great domain name and it seems like a mashup of Twitter/Quora. Will be interesting to follow this.
Not signing up for a service that wants significant OAuth access to my Twitter (or any other) account without giving me neither a reason nor an alternative.
To the curious: It's a messageboard with some nice UX elements and a few twists (you have to ask or be invited in order to post to threads).
Annoying, though, that not only do you have to fork over your Twitter credentials (and your entire graph over there), but then the site subsequently asks you to confirm an email address.
I thought OAuth & OpenID style logins were supposed to help cut down on friction, not add more?
Sorry for being negative, but the slogan made me close the tab in horror. The page took a while to load and I couldn't figure out what it did, but was curious. Then slogan loaded and I closed it in a hurry. "New way to talk to each other" is NOT a good slogan.
I noticed the same thing wrt recent activity. I'd like discovery to be front and center, and be able to scroll through a list rather than 2 at a time in the right column, and having to click each time. Continuous scroll would be optimal.
The apparent lack of nested commenting kills it for me. Also, it takes up a ton of space to show very little information. It's like if a designer was given unlimited license to produce something beautiful and useless.
There doesn't look to be a way to search or discover content, which leads to this sort of "loneliness" problem. It would be nice to search or suggest groups or discussions based on who I follow on Twitter or something, but as of now my homepage is just...pretty bare, and I'm waiting on folks to do stuff with my topic before I can use the site any further.
We tested an MVP of a very similar service some months back. When we launched http://www.qonversa.com, we had no idea about Branch. So we launched a MVP and tested the hypothesis on a set of Indian users(we are from India). The idea fell flat coz of the exact same problems mentioned by everyone out here. The site's still there & we are thinking of pivoting it or maybe working on something else. Any inputs?
Man, I've tried to use Branch. A few times. I've tried to invite people and join conversations, but I just can't get into it.
I resent the fact that there is no content discovery on the site. Why can't I be able to search for conversations? I don't care about "most highlighted branches". Branch doesn't know what my preferences are. Whereas on a site like Quora, content discovery by topic and search is brilliant.
Well after being frustrated by the lack of any real explanation on the home page, I did manage to fumble around on Google and find their actual "What is this" page. Still pretty vague, but they should definitely put some of this content on their current home page:
Totally fucking lame. I can't search for discussions. They hide the popular discussions in the sidebar. All hype, zero value. It's pretty and that's all. $2M in funding, I laughed.
Can someone please explain what branch is and why it's different? I can't seem to make heads nor tails of it, and the front page video is typical useless marketing material.
Branch is basically a conversation platform. User A posts up a topic and then invites people who he/she feels is knowledgeable about the topic to answer it. The invited people can in turn invite others to the conversation as well. You can think of it as a private forum.
It's a page of 9 short comments, but 8/9 are are elided after the first few words. Is the new way of talking to each other sentences where you can't see the end?
[+] [-] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
The number of tools intended to "enhance conversation" are a dime a dozen, but fair or not, I think there is something to be said for traction and widespread use, even though it may seem like a chicken-and-egg problem.
If blogs and online publishers wanted to use the format, they would want to put it on their website directly for the ads, hits, and audience interaction, but Storify already accomplishes this to a large extent (barring any shut-down by Twitter).
It reminds me of the whole ~~social media~~ web 2.0 craze way back when.
There is also something weird about inviting people to listen in on a pseudo-private conversation. It makes it very artificial and staged somehow.
But hey, the logo is pretty cool. Probably one of my favourites out there.
+++
EDIT: If I were Branch, instead of promoting it as something generally applicable, which it is not, I would promote it as something targeting more niche purposes where it makes sense to use it and grow it from there and let people discover utilities slowly.
Another way to promote and develop it is as a GroupMe for Twitter, which by now is its own type of communication. As an addition to DMs and @mentions in your Twitter bar, you now have branches of conversations defined by the topic or group of people.
That kind of integration would probably lead to a Twitter acquisition, but that can't be the worst thing to happen to a company anyway ...
---
The impression their website leaves users with is that this is something aimed specifically at self-important boffins and "thought leaders" - bloggers in realms Apple, tech, and Awl-ish dabblings. Exclusive online punditry circlejerk, essentially. The Davos of social media.
It just reinforces the idea that I am never going to use this, because let's be honest, I am not important/well-connected enough to get asked to join anyone's conversation - and I don't want to spam people just to try the thing out. It's as if it is a recursive start-up which has created a tool designed to let users talk about the start-up.
They should call themselves Recursive Corp instead of Obvious Corp, because it seems to have based its entire philosophy on its Valley-esque self-importance and -indulgence.
[+] [-] graue|13 years ago|reply
Agree. What if they were actually private conversations, but with the same model of inviting people in?
I thought of Branch recently when I was reading the intro of Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"[1]. He mentions that before the internet, technology only enabled two-way, one-to-one communication (telephone, telegraph) and one-way, one-to-many communication (newspapers, radio, TV). The pattern of many-to-many, starting with BBSes in the 70s and becoming fully ubiquitous only now with Facebook, is new.
It got me thinking about how the many-to-many communication models online don't match those we have offline. When you have many-to-many communication offline, you sit down at a table with a small group of friends, family, or colleagues. Everyone at the table can listen and speak. People can leave, or new people can be invited to join. And the group is an ad-hoc one, formed for the conversation, which doesn't persist after the conversation is over.
There's no form of online conversation that has these characteristics — no remotely mainstream one, anyway. And Branch is interesting to me because it's sort of trying to tackle that, except by allowing everyone in the world to read the conversations (or "listen"), they turned it into something completely different.
I don't think many-to-many communication online is a solved problem. We may still see new, better models that will displace the current ones.
[1]: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
[+] [-] rsobers|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lylemckeany|13 years ago|reply
I tried it out a few months back when I had an interesting exchange on Twitter with Jason Evanish (@Evanish). Check it out here: http://branch.com/b/who-will-pave-the-way-for-future-human-s.... Being able to import our back and forth on Twitter into a discussion was pretty slick since Twitter isn't very good at managing a back and forth when another person wants to get involved.
Everything seemed cool up until that point. I then invited some folks who I thought might want to chat about and have something to say on the subject matter, a couple of my co-founders and Hiten Shah who works with Jason. The invitation process seemed so spammy to me though. It sent a Twitter @ mention to everyone and without any context, it just felt forced. A few people asked to join the conversation and I approved them in order to see if we could get something going, but none of them ever responded at all.
Perhaps if I had a larger network of people in the know about Branch it would've worked better. I definitely like the idea of it and the execution is close, in my opinion.
[+] [-] dionidium|13 years ago|reply
http://branch.com/b/the-90-9-1-rule-can-it-be-broken
But I don't see anything there that makes me think I should be using it.
[+] [-] dbyrd|13 years ago|reply
Branch is really close to being really useful. They just need to make it for the everyday person the way HN/Reddit is without loosing the "Davos of Social Media" elements.
[+] [-] agildehaus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfard|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rozap|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|13 years ago|reply
That might be a little too negative, my initial impression of this is that whatever small amount of utility it may actually give just isn't that interesting or different from what we already use.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] taligent|13 years ago|reply
But after clicking around I worked it out. It was an elitist (and far less useful) version of Quora. Or was it simply a polished discussion board. Then I clicked the About Branch button and realised it was more about the Twitter integration than anything.
IMHO: Try and clarify what this is on the home page. "A new way to talk to each other." is contrived, meaningless and simply not true. It's not new, it's better.
[+] [-] therandomguy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fourstar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sthatipamala|13 years ago|reply
Mods: I feel like the original submission title should be restored to give context to the submission.
[+] [-] netcraft|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickmb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fassbin|13 years ago|reply
Annoying, though, that not only do you have to fork over your Twitter credentials (and your entire graph over there), but then the site subsequently asks you to confirm an email address.
I thought OAuth & OpenID style logins were supposed to help cut down on friction, not add more?
[+] [-] r4vik|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jongold|13 years ago|reply
http://branch.com/g/design-startups
[+] [-] zavulon|13 years ago|reply
Great domain name, though.
[+] [-] volaski|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dlf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanctgardner2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 10char|13 years ago|reply
There doesn't look to be a way to search or discover content, which leads to this sort of "loneliness" problem. It would be nice to search or suggest groups or discussions based on who I follow on Twitter or something, but as of now my homepage is just...pretty bare, and I'm waiting on folks to do stuff with my topic before I can use the site any further.
[+] [-] deathfrag|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] instakill|13 years ago|reply
I resent the fact that there is no content discovery on the site. Why can't I be able to search for conversations? I don't care about "most highlighted branches". Branch doesn't know what my preferences are. Whereas on a site like Quora, content discovery by topic and search is brilliant.
Maybe one day.
[+] [-] aroman|13 years ago|reply
http://branch.com/learn-more
[+] [-] theflubba|13 years ago|reply
However, I created a scala group: http://branch.com/groups/scala/join/a726238227c
[+] [-] bdcravens|13 years ago|reply
I need to hop on the VD train.
(last answer on that page as of now)
[+] [-] byjess|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickyc091|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ranman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joebolte|13 years ago|reply