Comment by joelrunyon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joelrunyon | Hacker News Reader

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Okay, I love the simplicity behind Obvious' work, but I'm seriously confused about what the purpose behind some of these projects.

Lift - http://lift.do/ - tagline is "achieve anything" - give us your email. Nothing else.

Branch - http://branch.com/ - was on HN the other day and has a pretty video, but I have no idea what they actually do as a product/service.

Medium - http://medium.com/ - despite the nice blog post, I still have no idea what they do.

Ev & co are undoubtably talented and they're working on what seems to be some cool stuff, but I feel like I've read a bunch of stuff about what they're doing and still have NO IDEA what it is they're doing.

Is this just me?

It appears they are missing Jack. He was, apparently, behind the idea for Twitter, and now you can see his new venture took off and never stopped ever since. This being said, I think Branch is going to be one of the most influential products in coming years. Death to the monologues.

On the Lift side, try reading this blog post, Everything There Is To Know About Lift: http://blog.lift.do/post/25435255834/everything-there-is-to-...

And on the Branch side, you can try the service. It's available now and if you use it you get a pretty good sense of it. Also, try reading What is Branch Good For? http://branch.com/b/re-what-is-branch-good-for-2

As a tl;dr person, I just don't get the message: "We’re rethinking publishing and building a new platform from scratch. This is a preview." is about as buzzword saturated as possible. Plus their homepage says "Your text here".

I feel every so often a designer has an urge: let's just build it and see what people use it for. It sometimes works, but mostly the user just stares at the screen until something distracts him/her, and then wanders off.

They are creating Twitter overlays -- new applications that attempt to leverage the Twitter social graph in clever ways.

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