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Comment by code51 | Hacker News Reader

I guess Branch is trying to do this already. http://branch.com/

A pity about their clueless home page. Please tell me what you're going to give me in exchange for my email address.

I understand the importance to a business of reaping the email address up-front. But there needs to be a clear quid pro quo. For all I can tell from the home page, I'm signing up for Amway, and the next message I get will be from one of my dear cousins trying to shame me into buying some overpriced soap.

So can anyone here tell me what Branch is about?

You could check out bulletin.branch.com for some context.

This serves as a demo of what they are trying to do. http://branch.com/b/obvious-and-branch-partner-up

I hit that link before griping. [EDIT: the bulletin's root link, that is, not the deep link you provided - thanks for that.] I was that kind, at least.

It links to a blog. This margin is too small to contain my full lecture about why you do not want to introduce your product to the world via a blog, but here's the condensed version: The top of the Bulletin is an out-of-context article about Twitter integration with the Mystery Product. Then the next half-dozen entries are beautiful photos of people being hired to work on the Mystery Product. Then I got bored with scrolling and gave up.

I'm not going to hunt for your call to action. If I wanted puzzles I'd be training on http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/

They seem to be doing exactly what I'm trying to do. I think they lack a feature or two, but it could be on their roadmap. Thanks for telling me about this. I don't know if I should feel happy or sad. :|

You should be happy. It means your idea is somewhat validated in that someone else is willing to put money and effort into making conversation better on the internet ;)

*disclaimer: I work at Branch, and we are indeed focusing on many of the problems you raised in your original post. If you look at the @branch twitter account you'll see many more examples of branches that you'd be interested in reading.

I understand. But, I'm just a learner trying to find a pet project that I could be excited about. This was it, but knowing that there are money-backed teams somewhere in the states working on this is discouraging. I was hoping to use this opportunity to work hard and learn async web programming, say node.js/socket.io or maybe meteor.

If I would have been an entrepreneur, I would have hit you guys head-on with a better implementation. ;) :P

Anyway, all the best guys. I did shoot you a mail, and am also waiting for an invite at the least, if possible. :)

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