Branch
branch.com
branch.com
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.
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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 ...
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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.
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.
This is the best way to describe it. They DO have something here and they are close but the vision just needs a bit more clarity.
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.
In-person many-to-many communication is a known problem. It's called "meetings", or sometimes "Parliament" or "Congress".
The key technique used is to create a mutex on emitting sound.
There's a family of very sophisticated transactional protocols built around managing this mutex. It's called "Rules of Order".
People interested in the listed topic see it and "join" by entering, then glance around either near the beginning or the end, or try to get caught up, looking for a strand to join in with. They can leave again freely or speak up, and whoever is left paying attention may respond to them. Only the people interested continue to pay attention, and eventually the discussion dies out and everyone's moved on. The ad-hoc group no longer persists.
It doesn't really have an effective way to invite people into the conversation, but I feel that the other things are present.
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.
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.
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.
Quora is for monologues. Branch is for dialogues.
Quora gives your full attention to an answer. It collapses the comments. It lets you downvote unpopular opinions.
Branch limits the most that anyone can say at a time (to something like 800 characters--which is enough for an explanation but not enough for a tirade). And it gives equal weight to each comment that someone makes.
They give you a way to publish comments for any public URL on the web. And those comments live on their site in a comment thread they call a "branch."
I wonder how close I am. Clicking the "Let's get started" button now...
Hmm, I think I was pretty close. Branches, or comment threads, can be closed. Interesting. So they added a life span to a discussion, vs keeping it open for more comments. I wonder why. To preserve the quality of the initial discussion? Hmm.
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.
Mods: I feel like the original submission title should be restored to give context to the submission.
Can't place a single definition to the interface, but I like it. Others?
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?
Great domain name, though.
> do not need another way to talk to each other, we're doing just fine
People are very poor judges in deciding whether they need something new before they actually see it. I have no idea if this is something we "need" but this is some bizarre anti-progress attitude. The world is in need of new and better ways of doing almost everything.
I'm also challenging that "we're doing just fine". Progress is always welcome and needed.
That said, I'd disagree with zavulon on Branch slogan. It's fun and provocative, and its vagueness kind of invites you to try the service. Which might be a bad idea for a startup—but as the rest of the ‘book cover’ looks very nice, I think it'll work.
> People are very poor judges in deciding whether they need something new before they actually see it.
One could argue that people in general aren't good at judging if they actually need something or not, regardless of whether they saw or used said thing.
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.
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.
However, I created a scala group: http://branch.com/groups/scala/join/a726238227c
I need to hop on the VD train.
(last answer on that page as of now)
The front page doesn't really state this but from what I can see it's effectively a forum mixed with twitter and limited to certain subjects.