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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, Tum
by kmfrk 14y ago
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.
- rsobers 14y agoI agree. This feels like a (really well-designed) solution searching for a problem.
- lylemckeany 14y agoI completely agree. 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-space-travel 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.
- taligent 14y ago>I definitely like the idea of it and the execution is close. 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.
- graue 14y ago> 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 http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html