The biggest indictment of Branch to me is that since they alpha/beta/gamma/episilon-launched months and months ago, no one I come across in my Twitter feed, Tumblr feed, RSS nor anywhere else uses it; it's something that seems deeply embedded in a Valley bubble. I am also dead-tired of promotional videos that in vague terms and promises make it sound like we're curing cancer.
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.
> There is also something weird about inviting people to listen in on a pseudo-private conversation. It makes it very artificial and staged somehow.
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.
I don't mean to suggest that many-to-many communication online is a solved problem, but I want to note that the description you offered of small-group 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.", sounds a lot like a thread on a forum to me. Or a thread on Hacker News, to whatever extent we'd like to claim this isn't a forum.
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.
Nope, that's not private and not restricted. Essentially everyone in the world is invited and everyone in the world (even those who don't speak) can listen. In practice the number of participants is much larger; at a table you probably have 2 <= N <= 10. And there's no presence information: if someone "gets up from the table" (stops looking at the thread) you don't know that. There's no visible distinction between being silent and not being there at all.
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.
"and I don't want to spam people just to try the thing out".
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.
When I launched http://throwww.com a while ago, people on HN/Twitter were telling me it's like Branch. I didn't know what Branch exactly was then, and now that I see it, I still don't get what it is. It doesn't seem at all like throwww though. Nice looking interface, anyway.
I think they're trying to solve the same problems other discussion-related services have by approaching the problems from a different perspective: discussions are private by default, and therefore the participants have greater control of signal:noise. They're trying to build from the bottom up instead of top down and hopefully that solves the problems most people associate with discussion services (e.g., comments), particularly people who abuse the the system in various ways such as trolls, griefers, and spammers.
It's a solution to a problem that nobody has. Reminds me of Google Wave, but less useful.
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.
I had no idea either. And then I clicked on "What do you like about Reddit?" and it said it ended in August 2012 which had me even more confused.
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.
I'm going to give them a bit of free user testing and do my best to summarize what I think they are about, now that I'm at their "Welcome to Branch!" screen:
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 may be true. But that's not how the services are designed.
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.
The initial flashy transitions that are happening are seriously slowly the overall page load. I don't know why intro/index pages do this so often. It just deters me from going further into the app. That said, it's a great domain name and it seems like a mashup of Twitter/Quora. Will be interesting to follow this.
Not signing up for a service that wants significant OAuth access to my Twitter (or any other) account without giving me neither a reason nor an alternative.
To the curious: It's a messageboard with some nice UX elements and a few twists (you have to ask or be invited in order to post to threads).
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?
Sorry for being negative, but the slogan made me close the tab in horror. The page took a while to load and I couldn't figure out what it did, but was curious. Then slogan loaded and I closed it in a hurry. "New way to talk to each other" is NOT a good slogan.
The short answer is I, and I'm sure tons of other people, do not need another way to talk to each other, we're doing just fine. There have been so many offering with almost that exact wording that its become a cliche.
It's interesting that you were so proud to judge a website by its slogan that you'd come here and tell all of us. It's one thing to have that reaction, it's another not to resist that urge and then announce to everyone that you judged the book by its cover.
> 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.
The slogan is pretty important though, isn't it? Maybe not from user acquisition standpoint, but at least it tells something about those who's behind the product.
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.
I actually did it with helpful intent. The slogan is so bad that it needs to be changed as soon as possible. Most people who see that slogan and not like it would not provide feedback about it.
I'm not challenging that it's a useful data point. I'm questioning why you couldn't resist the urge to close the tab if you're going to bother to offer feedback. Time is finite and it's a perfectly valid reaction but not if you're going to attempt constructive criticism.
I'm also challenging that "we're doing just fine". Progress is always welcome and needed.
When I read about someone closing the tab in horror, I understand that he/she really disliked something about the page and used this expression to be more striking. Is there anyone who literally does that? =)
I noticed the same thing wrt recent activity. I'd like discovery to be front and center, and be able to scroll through a list rather than 2 at a time in the right column, and having to click each time. Continuous scroll would be optimal.
The apparent lack of nested commenting kills it for me. Also, it takes up a ton of space to show very little information. It's like if a designer was given unlimited license to produce something beautiful and useless.
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.
We tested an MVP of a very similar service some months back. When we launched http://www.qonversa.com, we had no idea about Branch. So we launched a MVP and tested the hypothesis on a set of Indian users(we are from India). The idea fell flat coz of the exact same problems mentioned by everyone out here. The site's still there & we are thinking of pivoting it or maybe working on something else. Any inputs?
Man, I've tried to use Branch. A few times. I've tried to invite people and join conversations, but I just can't get into it.
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.
Well after being frustrated by the lack of any real explanation on the home page, I did manage to fumble around on Google and find their actual "What is this" page. Still pretty vague, but they should definitely put some of this content on their current home page:
Totally fucking lame. I can't search for discussions. They hide the popular discussions in the sidebar. All hype, zero value. It's pretty and that's all. $2M in funding, I laughed.
Can someone please explain what branch is and why it's different? I can't seem to make heads nor tails of it, and the front page video is typical useless marketing material.
Branch is basically a conversation platform. User A posts up a topic and then invites people who he/she feels is knowledgeable about the topic to answer it. The invited people can in turn invite others to the conversation as well. You can think of it as a private forum.
It's a page of 9 short comments, but 8/9 are are elided after the first few words. Is the new way of talking to each other sentences where you can't see the end?
The animation in the header of 'Our Company' may have something to do with it (that, and my laptop being ancient) as I crashed as well when attempting to close that tab.
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.
+++
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 ...
---
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.