D! DARE TO ASK - MEDIA\TECH\TALK

“Should content be considered a product?” — Welcome to Branch, the dinner-table discussion for the web

There’s another new kid on the Obvious Corp block, besides the much talked about Medium. And it looks sense making: Branch is a communication tool-box, built upon Twitter that lets you ‘branch out’ into deeper conversation with a group of people– rather than cluttering the Twitter stream. Like a dinner-table conversation powered by the interwebs.

The “circle of trust design” takes some hints from Google Hangout and also mindmaps conversation streams. If you like a particular discussion point, you can branch out into a specific debate.

Conversations can also be embedded as widgets anywhere on the web. A topical discussion on Branch: “Should content be considered a product?”. Very much so. Content + code together make up the conversation experience and most likely determine whether users bother to get involved.

Here is how the background story goes: Branch was initially started as ‘Roundtable’ in September 2011 by Princeton student Josh Miller, who bootstrapped the company from New York City with 2 co-founders. In January 2012 they moved to San Francisco to continue building the product with expert guidance from Obvious Corp.’s Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jason Goldman. But Obvious Corp is only one investor in Branch, who raised $2M earlier this year. They share the table with media/communication focused VCs BetaWorks, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels (all investors in Berlin-based Moped as well) plus a couple of angels including David Tisch.

How will Branch make money? Josh Millner provides some answers in the interview with Bloomberg TV:

Both, Medium and Branch seem like communication experiments from Biz Stone and Evan Williams, to figure out what form and functions fit the changed communication behaviour. And they have invited some high calibre beta testers to the dinner-table who will certainly shape the product with their feedback. Twitter started as a side product and some of its most valuable features  emerged by accident or where invented by users (like re-tweets). Definitely a space to watch.