Branch: a new way to talk to each other

OK, making me watch a Flash video to find out what your company does and who you are is counter-productive. I opened your home page, looked for information on why I should be interested and found a big, lifeless box (I run Flash-Block). The result was that I quickly closed your page and probably won't be back.

My advice is to remove the Flash video from your home page or at least supplement it with words.

Seems nice, but I'd really like to know what sets it apart from the competition.

My takeaway is that it concurrences skype and facebook for group conversation, with maybe a better UI (how so ?). The big feature is "branching" conversation so as to not get side-tracked from the main topic of each conversation. Is there more to it ?

A few points to address: branches seem to effectively mitigate some pain points in current solutions, however to use the service I'll have to go trough the much greater pain to move friends over. How do they plan to address that ? I.e. is there more value that would justify switching, or maybe a scheme to ease the transition into the website (like private urls you can use without creating an account) ?

Secondly, conversations are only great if people actively contribute to them. How do they intend to promote user contributions ? A very basic but important thing would be to be notified of new contributions. A desktop app with warnings would be worthwhile, I think.

Is there any way to use this service without receiving targeted ads?

From their privacy policy: "We may use and allow access to other data collected by the Branch Service to enable the delivery of online advertising on the Branch Service, or otherwise facilitate transmittal of content and information that may be useful, relevant, valuable or otherwise of interest to you."