Branch launched publicly about eight months ago with the idea of creating a public space for limited conversations among a few people. While it’s fostered some interesting discussions so far (“Is there a bubble?” “What have you learned about visiting Las Vegas?” “How much should a writer be paid, if anything?“), the company is clearly still figuring out how to get conversations going on the site.

I recently spoke with people from Branch and Hyatt, one of the first companies that’s been using Branch for marketing purposes, and it was clear from our conversation that Branch could have a real future in giving companies a place to talk to with consumers in a way that’s both fairly public and transparent but also limited in terms of the investment required by the companies. In other words, some of the aspects of Branch that make it unappealing to users could actually work in its favor when it comes to courting large businesses as customers — and potentially making money on the site.

Branch wasn’t created by one of the former Twitter founders like Medium was, but instead joined the Obvious Corp back in March of 2012. We wrote about the company in July and talked with CEO Josh Miller, who explained the idea behind the product and how he wanted to create the types of conversations people have with friends around a dinner table, but transport those conversations online to be shared and viewed publicly.

But as my colleague Mathew Ingram noted at the time, that closed nature of Branch conversations that are then posted online are reminiscent of blogs without comments — they seem odd to those of use who’ve become used to the spontaneous, collaborative qualities of traditional social media:

“The discussion also seems oddly sterile for anyone who has gotten used to the somewhat chaotic nature of a Twitter debate — or even in blog comments. And because it is less open, there is less of an opportunity for flames or irrelevant comments, but there is also less opportunity for a smart comment from a stranger.”

Yet the closed nature of the discussions and the greater assurance of quality control are obvious perks for a company like Hyatt that wants to hear what frequent travelers think of hotels, and wants to share that feedback publicly but doesn’t necessarily want to maintain a lengthy Facebook feed about the topic. Not to mention, users would probably get annoyed if Hyatt retweeted a lot of people tweeting about hotels, explained Dan Moriarty, the director of digital strategy for Hyatt.

But when I asked Moriarty why he doesn’t just send out a survey asking people what they think of hotels, he explained that the company has learned the value of sharing public feedback with users and the company gets more out of the experience in the long run by appearing more transparent.

“I think we’re over that worry,” he said about the possibility that users would post negative things publicly about Hyatt on a company Branch thread. “I think we’ve done a similar thing on Facebook or the website we started for the campaign, so we’ve worked through the pain of worrying about what people would say about us in social spaces.”

He noted that with a Branch conversation, Hyatt can pick influential travel or hotel bloggers and ask them about hotels, and then once the Branch is over, they can keep sharing the conversation and make sure other users see how the company took that feedback into account. So a conversation hosted with 20 people can get shared out to thousands of others. You could certainly argue that it’s a lot less transparent and truly open for a company to hand-pick people for a Branch conversation than respond to angry customers on Twitter, but you can see the appeal from the company’s perspective, and there’s no reason a company couldn’t do both.

“When you look at Branch… it’s just like-minded people opting into a conversation on things they care about,” he said. “So we definitely get a higher-quality of responses that are more thought through.”

Libby Brittain, the director of editorial development for Branch, said the company is still new, and they’re not sure what a money-making strategy with large corporate partners would look like, but it’s something they’ll evaluate.

“For publishers or brands, they’ve been told to be conversational for years,” she said. “But sometimes they really struggle to deliver on that promise with their customers or clients. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how this has worked.”

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However, a few themes came out of our presentations from Paul Berry, founder and CEO of RebelMouse, Jeff Fluhr, co-founder and CEO of Spreecast, Matt Galligan, co-founder and CEO of Circa, Aria Haghighi, co-Founder and CTO of Prismatic, and Josh Miller, co-founder of Branch. Here were the ones we found most compelling:

• The future of news will come from other people. This isn’t to say that the majority of the world will eventually get all of their news from Twitter and Facebook, but it is fair to say that we’ll increasingly rely on recommendations and smarter social cues from friends and respected strangers as we sort through the vast amount of information available online. This could mean something like Prismatic, which as my colleague Mathew Ingram has written, is working to combine data from social media with individual interests to create a smarter social reader for news.
• We’ll be reading all the news that fits — on mobile. For traditional sites, having a strategy that works for mobile is not longer an option, but we’ll increasingly see mobile-specific approaches from startups like Instagram, which was able to scale successfully by creating a simple, fast photo experience for mobile users in a hurry, or Circa, the startup that’s re-thinking how to structure news stories based on the attention spans and needs of mobile readers.  ”We distill these important details into specific pages,” Galligan said. “You hop through and jump from point to point.”
• It’s all about the individual person and the brand they build. Obviously individuals have always had a hand in shaping the news since the days of newspaper editors picking the stories that end up on the front page. But since the early days of blogging we’ve seen the rise of the personal brand grow in importance, and our panel earlier on Wednesday with some of the pre-eminent bloggers like Maria Popova and Andrew Sullivan only solidified the idea that smart, passionate writers can build their own readership online. Berry talked about how RebelMouse is allowing any individual, whether a famous blogger or not, to highlight personal achievements and content in one place, and with the rise of Twitter we’ll likely see this continue. “RebelMouse allows you in a very efficient way to say, let’s make this my splash,” he said.
• People want to talk about the news but they’re looking for smart conversations. We’re moving on from the days of television round-tables and flame wars in comment threads — or at least many people are looking to move on. Several interesting tools have launched recently that allow for more dynamic conversations online about the news, and we’re seeing those conversations happen both in text and multimedia. Spreecast joins the likes of Google+ Hangouts in lettings users host video discussions with additional social components, and Branch is looking to re-invent online discussions by making them invite-only and embeddable across the web.
• Traditional advertising can’t support the future, but no one’s clear what the alternative looks like. Some of our most heated discussions all day came from the discussion over how to make money from content in a way that allows writers and artists to benefit, consumers to enjoy reasonable prices, and businesses to stay afloat. From Popova discussing affiliate links to Buzzfeed discussing sponsored content, it’s clear we’re far from reaching a consensus. But from Prismatic’s efforts to work with brands to make money off their content on the service to Spreecast’s premium services, it’s clear that startups are at least considering smarter ways to approach the problem than traditional banner ads.

Check out the rest of our PaidContent Live 2013 coverage here.

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Branch wrote in a blog post that while the company is working to improve the features surrounding commenting, users asked for a cleaner, simpler version, and the company is complying:

“Over the last few months, we’ve spent time adding features to this simple tool: features like groups, a notification drawer, ask-to-join, and ‘branching.’ But we’ve also spent time listening, and when we did, we heard that while these features make having conversations easier and more delightful, they also make Branch more complicated. And that’s the last thing we wanted to do.

So starting today, you’ll find a simpler http://www.branch.com.

Just like before, you can start a branch, add people to it, and talk to each other. You can also still take your conversation and put it anywhere: embed it on a website, share it on Twitter or Facebook, or link to it in an email. What you won’t find is a complex notification system, groups architecture, ask-to-join process, or a way to “branch” individual posts. (But don’t worry! All your content is safe and sound.)”

When Branch was still in private beta in July 2012, cofounder Josh Miller explained to GigaOM that he envisioned Branch evolving to become more like Google Wave, but with some key differences. He’ll be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17.

“I think the promise of Google Wave is really interesting. Ultimately, it was too complicated a product,” Miller said at the time. “We’re focused on offering a very simple user experience. We’re really interested in the portability of conversations.”

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People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it. jellyhq.com/post/466234974…—
Biz Stone (@biz) April 01, 2013

In a blog post titled, “What is Jelly?” Stone didn’t actually explain much what Jelly is, but did hint at a mobile-oriented startup. And yes, the company is based in San Francisco and it’s hiring.

“People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it.

Jelly is a new company and product named after the jellyfish. We are inspired by this particular animal because neurologically, its brain is more “we” than “me.” Also, for the past 700 million years, this decentralized structure has been wildly successful.

News of Jelly emerged unexpectedly early so I’ll wait a bit to share more about the team. In the meantime, I’ll say this. Jelly will be for everybody, it will be developed first and foremost for mobile devices, and it will be free. But, it won’t be ready for a while.”

Based on Stone’s past ventures with Twitter and Blogger, it seems likely that Jelly will end up with a social bent. Stone noted that he’ll be focusing mainly on Jelly right now.

He re-launched the Obvious Corp with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and early Twitter employee Jason Goldman back in June 2011, and so far the umbrella company has launched a few startups, including Medium and Branch, which presumably will be overseen by Stone’s co-founders now.

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Atwood, who left Stack Exchange — the company that manages Stack Overflow and a number of other similar sites — about a year ago, launched his new venture on Tuesday with a blog post in which he lamented the fact that commenting and user forums have not changed much in the past decade. The vast majority of these platforms, he says, still fail to capture real conversation and are too difficult or expensive to implement.

Figuring out who to trust is the holy grail

The Stack Overflow founder says his new platform, which is known as Discourse, differs from other commenting systems in a number of ways — including the fact that it is fully open source. Atwood used the blog-publishing platform WordPress as a model (see disclosure below), and says the company will rely on selling hosting, support and other services for revenue.

Discourse has raised funding from a group of venture backers including Greylock and SV Angel, although Atwood wouldn’t say how much (another hosted commenting solution, Livefyre, also just closed a round of financing).

In addition to some other innovations, such as links that automatically expand within a comment (in the same way Twitter’s “expanded tweets” do), Atwood says he is trying to build a reputation system that will grant users new abilities based on the level of trust the platform has in them. Although he doesn’t provide a lot of detail, in a comment on a Hacker News discussion thread he suggests that it will be based on behavior such as flagging abusive posts.

Measuring trust and rewarding good behavior is something online communities have been trying to do for years, with mixed success. Some believe that sites like Slashdot — which has a moderation platform that awards “karma points” for certain behavior and appoints moderators automatically — have a good solution to the usual problems of trolling and flame wars, while others argue that these systems are almost always fatally flawed. Metafilter (which charges users $5 to become members) has many fans, but it is also a relatively small community. Branch is another attempt to reinvent user forums and discussion as invitation-only hosted conversations.

Trust takes effort, not just algorithms

Atwood says he wants to use a badge system for rewards (something Huffington Post also uses), but Gawker founder Nick Denton said in an interview last year that a similar reward system his sites used was a “terrible mistake,” because it was easily gamed and encouraged the wrong kinds of behavior. Denton has since completely revamped Gawker’s commenting system in an attempt to make reader comments the centerpiece, as well as a potential business model.

As my colleague Jeff Roberts noted in a recent post, the Huffington Post has also launched what it hopes will be a new feature called Conversations, which allows popular comments to become full-fledged blog posts of their own. The Verge — a tech blog run by Vox Media — is doing something similar with its site, in order to try and encourage more discussion and community. But both take a lot of manual effort.

Veteran blogger Anil Dash pointed out in an insightful post in 2011 that one of the only ways to maintain and encourage a healthy conversation — regardless of what platform you use — is to be involved in those discussions yourself as much as possible (a point Bora Zivkovic of Scientific American also made recently). Unfortunately for publishers looking for a quick or inexpensive fix, that kind of engagement is almost impossible to automate.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Sam72 and Yan Arief Purwanto

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If you’re unfamiliar with Branch, which will be part of the startup showcase at our paidContent Live media conference in New York on April 18, the point of the site is to make online discussions feel like the ones that take place around the kitchen table. It does this by allowing you to start a chat from anywhere on the internet, or transport an existing discussion (or screaming match) taking place on Twitter or elsewhere and continue it in on Branch. By clicking “Take it to Branch,” you transform a discussion into an invite-only forum that anyone can read but that requires the moderator’s permission to join.

Branch’s new features are intended to make the site feel more social by showing what the people you are connected to online are talking about — which will, presumably, encourage people to ask to join more conversations. Likewise, the “profile cards” may serve to make the people you see on Branch feel more accessible.

“Now you can click anyone’s name and hop around between the branches they’ve participated in and people they’ve talked to. They’re intended to help you explore the pockets of communities on Branch, not represent the user’s identity,” explained Branch founder Josh Miller by email (emphasis his). As an example, here’s the Branch “card” for my colleague, Mathew Ingram:

So what will all this do for Branch’s popularity? It’s hard to say. So far, the company has received a lot of attention because of Miller’s reputation as a wunderkind (he came up with the idea while working for Senator Diane Feinstein and dropped out of Princeton to pursue it) and because Branch is backed by the founders of Twitter and by tech media star Jonah Peretti. But it’s still not clear if Branch can break through to widespread adoption; as Ingram noted this spring, “closed” conversations reduce flame wars and trolling but also lack the freewheeling feel of the internet. Without easier on-ramps to the Branch discussions, the site may find it hard to appeal to a broader base than tech and media insiders.

One area where Branch does appear to have the potential to take off is as a forum for people to discuss sports or TV. For example, here’s a Branch discussion about the show Homeland that got a lot of traction.

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A host can invite group members one time through a link and members of a group can start a conversation within the group at any time. The group will have its own web page that can attract followers, who can ask to join the group or just follow the conversation. A follower can also track any new conversations started by the group, just like a Twitter user can follow tweets from someone after following their account.

The goal is to recreate the small conversations that sprout up at a dinner party, said Josh Miller, the CEO and founder who dropped out of Princeton to start the company. Each group can serve as a little dinner party, which can create new conversations.

We’ve been looking at publishing more of own internal staff conversations here at GigaOM, which normally take place on Socialcast. We recently posted one discussion about tweeting during a disaster. That worked out well, but in the future, we might look at something like Branch to record and publish those discussions. The problem is, it’s hard to know when a conversations will turn into anything worth sharing.

It’s unclear how many people are using Branch at this point. The service, which has been funded by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, is part of a new generation of publishing tools along with Medium, another project from Williams and Stone, that is aimed at helping people collaborate and publish to the web.

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Branch allows users to pull others into conversations that can be preserved and made public. Users can initiate a conversation by inviting a person via email or through Twitter or through a bookmarklet that can turn a tweet or URL into a conversation. More recently, Branch has enabled the ability for people to view videos, photos and gifs inside a conversation. And it’s introduced a “branching” feature to build new branches from existing conversations.

Miller said in a blog post that he’s hoping to spur on more dinner table dialogues instead of monologues, which is what much of the Internet is built on. He said it can be used for deep discussions about big issues, sharing advice or just hanging out. ”We want it to be a place for you to talk about all the things that are happening in your world,” he wrote.

New York City-based Branch earlier this year partnered with Obvious Corp., the startup from Twitter founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams, who joined in a $2 million fundraising round along with other investors including SV Angel, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and others.

As Miller told me, he isn’t trying to push one use of Branch but is hoping that users will figure all kinds of applications for it, much in the way that Twitter has evolved in the hands of users. But that is also a danger, he admitted, because there isn’t one clear use case above others. We’ll see if Branch can catch on as an IM replacement, comments alternative or publishing platform or perhaps something we haven’t thought of.

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Branch co-founder Josh Miller

As a hot, buzzy start-up in private beta, Branch has enjoyed advanced hype thanks to some high profile users and backers. But it also suffers from misconceptions as well because it’s not quite clear to the public what it will be. Is it a form of a private Twitter, or a comments replacement, a publishing tool or something completely different?

The service, which won’t go public for another six weeks, evolved from Miller’s first idea called Roundtable. That was initially framed as a high-brow content source, pulling in expert commentary from people on different topics. Branch has since been reshaped with the help of Twitter founders Ev Williams, Biz Stone and former Twitter VP of product Jason Goldman, who are investors along with SV Angel, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and others. The service, which closed $2 million in seed funding in March, now allows people to pull in other people into multimedia chats that can be preserved with a URL and can evolve as participants invite others into the conversation.

I recently sat down with Miller, a 21-year-old Princeton drop-out, at his office at Betaworks and asked what the right analogy might be for the company. He said in some ways, Branch is trying to be a simplified version of the now deceased Google Wave, a comparison he has never talked about before. That may not inspire a lot of confidence, but it speaks to what Miller is really trying to do with Branch.

“I think the promise of Google Wave is really interesting. Ultimately, it was too complicated a product,” Miller said. “We’re focused on offering a very simple user experience. We’re really interested in the portability of conversations.”

Google Wave launched to a lot of fanfare in 2009, offering users a real-time tool for collaboration. But it died a year later after failing to gain user traction. Miller believes that Branch can replicate some of the spirit of Google Wave but re-imagined in a simpler format. Users can just initiate a conversation by inviting a person via email or through Twitter or through a bookmarklet that can turn a tweet or URL into a conversation. The conversation is public by default but hidden until someone shares the URL. Branch recently added the ability for people to view videos, photos and gifs inside a conversation. Users can add any one else to a conversation and there’s also a new way for viewers of the conversation to request an invitation.

“I’m trying to replicate a dinner conversation with a the ability to add a plus-one. You can just start with a group and the conversation and group can grow organically,” Miller said. “I think there’s a place for intimate direct conversations.”

Publications like Nieman Journalism Labs and TechCrunch have embedded Branch conversations on their site. The early uses on sites have led some to believe Branch was trying to be a replacement for commenting systems, albeit a pretty private one. A few months ago, Nick Denton instituted a new comments design with “branches,” which prompted speculation that Gawker had stolen Branch’s idea.

Miller said he isn’t trying to court any one use case. He’s hoping that users will find all kinds of different applications for Branch, whether it’s for internal corporate communications, sponsored forums, brain storming or as just a casual hangout area for friends.

But Branch also faces competition on various fronts. Commenting services, IM providers, blogging platforms, email threads, enterprise social services, group messaging start-ups or even Twitter and Storify also compete on some levels with the vision Branch is trying to promote. The challenge is for Branch to carve out enough use cases amid all those existing services while still projecting a coherent identity. But that, Miller admits, could be Branch’s weakness too if it can’t find one killer application.

“That’s my biggest worry. It could be amazing for a lot of things but not great for one,” said Miller. “But that’s our biggest opportunity too, with how many use cases there are.”

Miller has gradually learned to be open to the possibility that he might not have all the answers about his start-up. He said he was already leaning toward a more open approach with Roundtable when he went out to San Francisco in January to partner with Obvious Corp., the new venture by Williams, Stone and Goldman. It was there that he flipped his model away from a content site to a communications platform at the urging of Williams, who told him his users would ultimately help him figure out what the service would be.

Branch co-founders Hursh Agrawal, Cemre Güngör and Josh Miller

That’s been one of many lessons in Miller’s crash course in start-up education. As a junior at Princeton, Miller interned at Meetup in New York. Last summer, he left his studies behind to pursue his first idea Roundtable. Huffington Post and Buzzfeed co-founder Jonah Peretti became an early advisor and initially helped steer him toward building a media company. Now, he’s guided most closely by Goldman, the former VP of product at Twitter who moved out from Obvious Corp.’s San Francisco to live in New York and advise Branch, which has relocated back to New York.

The company just hired its first iOS developer, who will be working to get Branch a mobile app. It’s also hired someone to coordinate with publishers, who want to use Branch on their sites. That could be part of Branch’s revenue story, which could also involve brands using Branch for sponsored forums.

I have to admit, the first time I heard about it, Branch sounded a little elitist. And it also made me believe that it would work more with users who had a big following of fans interested in seeing some interesting conversations preserved. But it looks like Branch is really trying to be more of an all-purpose tool. I, for one, was a little sad to see Google Wave go though I liked the idea of it more than the actual product. I’d like to see if Branch can evolve and become more of an every day tool in that same vein. It will be a tall order and there’s no guarantee Branch won’t face a similar fate as Google Wave.

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Branch, which is still in alpha, was formerly known as Roundtable, and was initially thought of as a group-blogging platform, but over the past six months it has morphed into a kind of platform for hosted conversations. As I understand it, based on comments from co-founder and CEO Josh Miller — and a blog post by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, whose Obvious Corp. has invested in the company — the idea is that experts and others with some status around a certain topic don’t always want to take part in discussions on wide-open forums such as blog posts or Facebook pages or on Twitter. With Branch, they can theoretically have a more restricted dialogue with others they invite to participate. As Stone puts it, the service:

[E]nables a smart new brand of high quality public discourse. Curated groups of people are invited to engage around issues in which they are knowledgeable.

So, for example, Anil Dash — founder of Expert Labs and Activate Media, and a former executive with blog platform Six Apart — started a recent discussion thread about how blogs need to evolve, and invited Meg Hourihan, Evan Williams and Paul Bausch (who co-founded Blogger and later sold it to Google) as well as Matt Haughey, founder of the pioneering web community Metafilter. In his introduction, Dash said that some of the elements of traditional blogging such as comments “have been stuck in a model that doesn’t work very well to encourage quality responses, and also doesn’t fit the way people do things socially online these days.” This is why some people such as MG Siegler and Daring Fireball writer John Gruber have chosen not to have comments at all.

Is restricting the number of participants good or bad?

The discussion was informative and interesting, but at the same time it was restricted to just five people. They are all undoubtedly knowledgeable, but there was none of the back-and-forth that we take for granted in many other forums, including open ones such as Twitter or a blog. It’s true that there was also a distinct lack of flame wars and trolling, which many see as the downsides of an open platform, but is the tradeoff worth it? Quora, a question-and-answer platform co-founded by former Facebook staffers Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, has faced many of the same issues as it has tried to grow: how much does being closed (or heavily moderated) impede valuable discussion?

A discussion about that issue started earlier this week on Twitter, and included my GigaOM colleague Om Malik, as well as former TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld, longtime open-web advocate Kevin Marks, Twitter’s director of platform Ryan Sarver and Anil Dash, among others (an archived view of some of the conversations is available using a tool that Marks developed was developed by former Reddit staffer Aaron Swartz). As with many discussions on Twitter, it was open to anyone who chose to comment — and those involved were free to respond or not to the comments as they came.

Josh Miller later started a thread at Branch about the same topic, but it was interesting to see how much less discussion there was on that forum. Marks made the point that the service seemed a little like Google+ Circles, but that he prefers the more open model of “semi-overlapping publics” that Twitter offers, and would rather respond at length on his own blog (a point Om made as well). For his part, Miller said that he doesn’t see the service as competing with more open forums such as blogs or Twitter, but as something supplementary that offers a more curated experience:

[T]he open community that Fred Wilson has cultivated is incredible. But there’s also a place for structured, curated conversations. It’s not elitist, it’s practical. Think about how many people can sit around a dinner table. A conversation – a true direct, dialogue – can only have so many voices speaking at once.

Part of the issue could be the invitation process, since users of Branch have to either enter the Twitter handle of a user they want to invite (who must be following them so a direct message can be sent) or an email address. This adds a whole layer of authentication and potential missed communication, and that could lead to fewer participants. But the discussion also seems oddly sterile for anyone who has gotten used to the somewhat chaotic nature of a Twitter debate — or even in blog comments. And because it is less open, there is less of an opportunity for flames or irrelevant comments, but there is also less opportunity for a smart comment from a stranger.

There is no question that as Facebook and Twitter have grown larger, there has been a corresponding increase in the amount of noise that we are subjected to, and that probably helps explain the popularity of more narrow or restricted networks such as Path, where users can only have 150 connections, and activity-centric services like Instagram. Could Branch become that kind of network for more curated conversations, or will it suffer from being too closed?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Gary Knight and Jeremy King

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