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Branch
- sthatipamala 14y agoI 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 14y agoWhat was the original submission title?
- sthatipamala 14y ago"Obvious Corp's Branch now open to public"
- d_rwin 14y agoany early users here? Interface has definitely changed since the beta invites. How have this changed for all? Can't place a single definition to the interface, but I like it. Others?
- hayksaakian 14y agoThat 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.
- therandomguy 14y agoWhy does the home page have no information on what it is except, "A new way to talk to each other"?
- fourstar 14y agoThe 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.
- hunterhusar 14y agoThis site just caused Chrome to crash.
- agildehaus 14y agoWhat the heck is it? I seriously can't tell from the front page.
- taligent 14y agoI 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 14y agoI 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 14y agoSorry but I see dialogues more often under the answers at Quora than I see at Branch(es?)
- temiri 14y agoThat 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.
- mikeleeorg 14y agoI'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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dlf 14y agoI 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.
- ranman 14y agoWOW, the design of this site is phenomenal. Beautiful UI/UX.
- jamesmoss 14y agoThis reminds me of https://menshn.com/ 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.
- webwanderings 14y agoAre there private groups yet? In order to compete with FB Groups, you would really need private groups.
- zavulon 14y agoSorry 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 14y agodon'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 14y agoThe 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 14y agoIt'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 14y agoI 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.
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- d0m 14y agoI think the design is gorgeous and find the general idea very interesting. Good luck for 2013
- visualcsharp 14y ago"A new way to talk to each other" isn't appropriate grammar. The site's slogan is "talking" to multiple people at the same time, as if I was asked by a group of my friends "what's Branch?" Slogans should generally talk to a single person since 99% of the time a person is sitting in front of their computer using the site. A better slogan would be "A new way to communicate with friends and family" or something along those lines.
- fassbin 14y agoTo 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 14y agonot a limitation of OpenID or OAuth, it's just that twitter doesn't give your email address to 3rd parties (facebook does)
- byjess 14y agoCan 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 14y agoBranch 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.
- 10char 14y agoI went through the process of creating a "Branch" about Native/Hybrid/Webview apps http://branch.com/b/native-vs-hybrid-vs-webview-mobile-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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- alpb 14y agoThis project is nothing new and must have been mentioned on HN before. Why is HN allowing duplicates these days?
- sthatipamala 14y agoI submitted this because Branch is now open to the public, instead of private beta.
- alpb 14y agoOh my bad then. Sorry.
- joebolte 14y agoIt'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?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- f6sultan 14y agoI got into Branch early; in their public beta stage. Being said that let me confess that I didn't spend much time on their site: mainly coz it's TL;DR I don't know about others but I personally found all of their conversations a bit boring and too long to read, follow, understand, then 'ask to join', then wait for someone to accept me into the branch, then I get the notification, yay..I go there then I'm like..."What did I wanted to say?". So I thought why not write a TL;DR comment on their Hacker Street entry. My questions are: 1. Why should I go to Branch when I can do my conversations on Google+ communities, Facebook groups, pages, messages, etc? Or maybe on Whatsapp (for private group chat) 2. I don't think that persisting a conversation is really a motivating factor for anyone. I don't really care if I had a good short lived healthy conversation on Facebook with some friends or with some strangers on my Facebook page/ Google+ page. 3. I think creating a board on Quora is a better option, mainly because you can converse with strangers who might add valuable insights to your discussion. 4. I cannot edit or delete anything on branch.com. Why? 5. Lastly, I think if I create a branch and invite Morgan Freeman to it, there's a slim possibility that he'll comply to my request. So why not stay with my friends on FB, fans on Google+?
- jongold 14y agoBeen having some great conversations about design recently; great to see Branch open to all. http://branch.com/g/design-startups http://branch.com/g/design-startups
- robgough 14y agoIs 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?
- jcomis 14y agoI 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.
- rickmb 14y agoNot 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.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoThe 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.
- kmfrk 14y agoThe 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.
- rsobers 14y agoI agree. This feels like a (really well-designed) solution searching for a problem.
- monsterix 14y agoIsn't this just a strong implementation of comment Ancestry in Rails? Seems like one to me.
- bdcravens 14y agoRandomly clicking around, busted out laughing when I came to http://branch.com/b/teen-wolf-or-vampire-diaries 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)
- Jemaclus 14y agoNo way to delete an account? Booooooo.
- theflubba 14y agoTotally 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 http://branch.com/groups/scala/join/a726238227c
- aroman 14y agoWell 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 http://branch.com/learn-more
- habosa 14y agoCongrats on the launch guys! Great to see successful HackNY alumni.
- nanch 14y agoI like it. Cool idea and looks like a good execution. Search would be nice, along with SSL.
- 3327 14y agoanother glorified forum emulation
- hayksaakian 14y agoSo it's a forum, that literally brings nothing new in terms of features?
- hayksaakian 14y agoSo it's a forum, that literally brings nothing new in terms of features?
- instakill 14y agoMan, 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.
- deathfrag 14y agoWe tested an MVP of a very similar service some months back. When we launched http://www.qonversa.com 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?