
Branch - sthatipamala
http://branch.com/
======
kmfrk
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.

+++

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.

~~~
graue
> _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.

[1]: <http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

~~~
wcarss
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.

~~~
graue
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.

~~~
wcarss
Ah, the distinction of smallness and privacy outside of the group didn't
originally catch my eye. Thanks for clearing it up. :)

------
agildehaus
What the heck is it? I seriously can't tell from the front page.

~~~
taligent
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.

~~~
temiri
I don't understand the "Branch is an elitist Quora" analogy (which is one that
I've heard before).

Quora is for monologues. Branch is for dialogues.

~~~
egeozcan
Sorry but I see dialogues more often under the answers at Quora than I see at
Branch(es?)

~~~
temiri
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.

------
therandomguy
Why does the home page have no information on what it is except, "A new way to
talk to each other"?

------
fourstar
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.

------
sthatipamala
I am submitting this because Branch is now open to the public.

Mods: I feel like the original submission title should be restored to give
context to the submission.

~~~
netcraft
What was the original submission title?

~~~
sthatipamala
"Obvious Corp's Branch now open to public"

~~~
hayksaakian
That is a much better title. The new one provides no context or help. I know
it's branch because the URL is right next to the title.

------
rickmb
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.

------
fassbin
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?

~~~
r4vik
not a limitation of OpenID or OAuth, it's just that twitter doesn't give your
email address to 3rd parties (facebook does)

------
jongold
Been having some great conversations about design recently; great to see
Branch open to all.

<http://branch.com/g/design-startups>

------
zavulon
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.

Great domain name, though.

~~~
volaski
don't really understand why you closed the tab in horror. Why is it not a good
slogan? After all, that's what it does.

~~~
zavulon
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.

~~~
detst
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.

~~~
zavulon
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.

~~~
detst
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.

~~~
egeozcan
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? =)

------
alanctgardner2
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.

------
10char
I went through the process of creating a "Branch" about Native/Hybrid/Webview
apps <http://branch.com/b/native-vs-hybrid-vs-webview-mobile-apps>

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.

------
deathfrag
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?

------
instakill
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.

Maybe one day.

------
aroman
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:

<http://branch.com/learn-more>

------
theflubba
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.

However, I created a scala group:
<http://branch.com/groups/scala/join/a726238227c>

------
bdcravens
Randomly clicking around, busted out laughing when I came to
<http://branch.com/b/teen-wolf-or-vampire-diaries>

_I need to hop on the VD train._

(last answer on that page as of now)

------
byjess
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.

~~~
rickyc091
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.

------
ranman
WOW, the design of this site is phenomenal. Beautiful UI/UX.

------
joebolte
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?

------
jcomis
I like it when I get linked to a started convo/branch, but I am having some
issues with discoverability. Mainly, I can't seem to discover anything.

------
robgough
Is there a way to search for groups you may be interested in joining... other
than guessing the URL? Or is that somewhat missing the point?

------
alpb
This project is nothing new and must have been mentioned on HN before. Why is
HN allowing duplicates these days?

~~~
sthatipamala
I submitted this because Branch is now open to the public, instead of private
beta.

~~~
alpb
Oh my bad then. Sorry.

------
webwanderings
Are there private groups yet? In order to compete with FB Groups, you would
really need private groups.

------
d0m
I think the design is gorgeous and find the general idea very interesting.
Good luck for 2013

------
nanch
I like it. Cool idea and looks like a good execution. Search would be nice,
along with SSL.

------
jamesmoss
This reminds me of <https://menshn.com/> (which was put together by a UK MP),
however it seems better executed.

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.

------
hayksaakian
So it's a forum, that literally brings nothing new in terms of features?

------
habosa
Congrats on the launch guys! Great to see successful HackNY alumni.

------
Jemaclus
No way to delete an account? Booooooo.

------
hunterhusar
This site just caused Chrome to crash.

~~~
ha470
Oh no! Sorry about that - any chance you remember which page?

~~~
flexxaeon
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.

------
3327
another glorified forum emulation

------
monsterix
Isn't this just a strong implementation of comment Ancestry in Rails? Seems
like one to me.

