Obvious Corp. backed Branch comes out of private beta | Hacker News Reader

Obvious Corp. backed Branch comes out of private beta

branch.com

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This is pretty great: https://img.skitch.com/20120813-1iq1gk3ymwrguhy8qe3qi4192s.j...

All branches are public, you can link directly to them:

http://branch.com/b/choosing-the-best-technology-for-my-webs...

Nice! I assumed login was required since it seemed like it forced me to. But great that direct links are public.

What is great about this?

it's completely nonsensical duckspeak, the hilarious part is how much it sounds like some of the actual conversations in silicon valley.

Just in case anyone doesn't realize---this is a (probably test) conversation between Obvious engineers.

"service-as-a-service" killed me :P I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of the conversation was Markov chain generated.

I think this looks interesting, as long as you don't apply the same "X of Y" comparisons.

Someone likened it to a forum, and I think it's a nice take on it. Not necessarily something with SOCIAL all over it.

The promo video was pretty horrible, though. I'm also getting a little tired of Valley videos that make it sound like we're curing cancer or something.

Yeah, the whole "curing cancer" meme always sounded murky and a bit lame TBH. It's unlikely it's a binary thing or state that get's magically achieved by one person or a team, and much more likely the result of small, incremental advances.

Cancer itself is not even "one thing" phenomologically speaking (IAMNA oncologist) it's a broad class of diseases, that may or may not have a single 'solution'.

Solution, in this context, being a state where the population does not need to worry about cancer as a statistically significant cause of death. It could equally likely linger in a status that is managed but not 'cured' in the traditional sense of the word, aka HIV.

Featured branches: http://www.branch.com/featured (sign in required)

Examples (no sign in required):

http://branch.com/b/barack-obama-the-second-time-around

http://branch.com/b/alternatives-to-the-boyscouts

http://branch.com/b/buying-equity-in-people-what-do-you-thin...

"To see that page, please [Sign in with Twitter]"

Also, there seems to be some sort of bug with the email collection modal. It refuses to go away, even though I've signed in with Twitter and provided my email. Makes it impossible to click the features stories.

We just pushed out a fix for this - it was happening to people who were already on our email waitlist.

If you enter your email now it should go away :)

Sorry about that!

Thanks for the quick fix!

This is unrelated to the actual product, but it's interesting that they'd choose to feature that branch on Obama. While a lot of the other branches seem to be highly informed discussions among experts who supply real evidence, that conversation seems shallow at best, very uniformed at the worst. Seemed more like a discussion you'd find in a Facebook comment thread and less like the conversations branch wants to foster. Did anyone else get that feeling?

They feature that branch because it consists of well-known online writers.

How is this different from a forum post? It doesn't do anything for debates. http://branch.com/b/are-we-currently-in-a-tech-bubble

Seems like a regular Quora thread sans voting.

I'm not sure how any of the highlighted features really promote intimacy or quality in conversation.

Let's ignore how they're pitching the service. I've participated in a Branch[1], and as a replacement for Twitter conversations, it is extraordinary. That's enough for me to keep the bookmarklet handy.

[1] http://branch.com/b/for-years-news-developers-have-debated-t...

That seems like a low bar, considering that Twitter conversations were never a good idea.

Agreed, but people are having conversations on Twitter. This seems like a low-friction way to get them to use a better tool for the job.

Early adopters and enthusiasm. It's fundementally no different to a forum or quora etc.

I hate to be that guy. (And really, I almost never say this). But, coming from the guys who made Twitter, can we talk about how and why this could possibly be monetized?

Neat idea. Gorgeous design. But how is Branch Inc sustainable?

You presume that it has to be sustainable to generate a profit.

He's making a good point -- how can it be sustainable without profit? Of course it needn't be sustainable to generate profit, but that's not what he meant, or said.

And @confluence is implying that the real goal may not be sustainability, but profit. See Sparrow, Instagram, and all the other sellouts.

Obvious advises the company, but AFAICT, Branch is a startup with young founders that don't really have any history with Twitter or Obvious.

It's neat. It's basically a different take on forums or twitter. Where your twitter page is a jumble of comments about N different conversations, Branch separates them into threads.

It's a new way and it'll get a lot of attention, but it's really just a way to communicate and there are lots of them. If Branch succeeds, it'll do so in the adoption of its style into other communications media, including existing forums or twitter.

Cool concept! I'm glad to see something like that working. I wrote down almost a year ago a very similar idea (I called it Flow) in a "incubator" project of mine: https://github.com/imdario/lyd/wiki/Analysis

Maybe it is time to code what I thought ;) It was meant to be a liquid democracy citizen participatory system.

Branch seems to want write access to my Twitter account, even just to "request an invite." Does anyone know why? It looks intriguing, but I'm not ready to trust it to that degree.

Sorry for the confusion! We should be more clear about our intentions. We need write access so when you do get an invite, you can invite your friends to branches (via DM or @mention). But we'll never send anything without your explicit permission.

Thanks for the explanation! I would suggest telling users this during signup (right before they auth).

Word of warning to everyone: when you request an invite, there's a pre-checked checkbox labeled "Follow @branch to find out about the best new branches." I like that it's easy to see, but I don't like that it's opt-out.

I like the idea and what I've seen so far, but how is this not still a private site? I can't contribute or be a part of branch until my time comes on the invite list.

Let me see if I've got this right.

Branch : Invite-Only Online Conversations. Email : Invite-Only Online Conversations.

Can someone help me bridge the gap?

Better interface for one.

Email has notoriously not been updated for a while. I remember when Gmail putting threads as conversations being revolutionary.

Threading in Gmail was definitely huge. They beat a lot of desktop mail clients to the punch, too, which always surprised me.

Seems like Branch would become One More Thing To Check, as opposed to a replacement for e-mail. I don't think they're going for an replacement, either. I think I get their point, but I also can't see it as much more than Twitter repackaged with unique slang and a squeaky clean UI.

I like to think of branches as public email threads, but I get in trouble when I say that publicly. Obviously has poor connotations :)

Haha, I'm sure. As far as product design goes, I think you've done a bang-up job. Individual branches are easy on the eyes and comfortable to consume for extended periods, and the primary actions are easy to identify. congrats on the launch.

Out of curiosity, where does it fit into your workflow specifically? Do you find yourself using either/any of Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc. less in particular?

looks kinda like Convore

Sorry, I'm not seeing how this differs from the G+ conversation scheme.

Hi Josh!

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