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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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? =)
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
I 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+?
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.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 80.6 ms ] threadMods: 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?
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.
http://medium.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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+?
http://branch.com/g/design-startups