Branch

» see branch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

branch never reached me. it was a brooklyn-and-manhattan media-twitter conversation tool, the kind of product that mattered if you spent your tuesday afternoons reading the verge and nieman lab and following journalists on twitter. honestly, that was not the part of the internet i lived in. i was reading turkish tech forums and the firefox release notes.

josh miller, hursh agarwal and cemre güngör built branch out of john borthwick's betaworks incubator in new york. miller had been a stanford undergrad who took time off to build the product. the public launch was august 2012. the idea was simple. you started a branch (a thread). you invited specific people you wanted in the conversation. anybody could read, only invited contributors could post. for whatever reason, that small constraint made the resulting discussion read more like a curated panel than the open shouting twitter optimized for.

betaworks gave branch the same launch energy it had given digg's relaunch and bitly's growth. ev williams sat on the early cap table. a small set of journalists and tech writers used branch for actual long-form discussions in late '12 and through '13. the audience never scaled past that initial tier. in january 2014 facebook bought branch and the sister recipe site potluck for around fifteen million dollars in an acqui-hire deal. miller moved to the facebook creative labs group and took over the rooms product, an anonymous chat-room app facebook shipped that october.

rooms shut in december 2015. by then miller had already left facebook in august to take a role as the white house's first director of product under the obama administration. on june 3 2015 miller posted a note on branch saying both branch and potluck were closing. the sites went read-only briefly, then dark. the acquisition price was never the point. branch belongs to the cluster of small social experiments facebook bought to absorb the team and then quietly shelved.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

branch's particular design choice was that public discussion needed gatekeepers to stay readable. anybody could see a branch, anybody could request to join, only specific invited contributors could post. the design assumed the value of a discussion came from who was inside it, not how many people were watching. that was an unusual thesis in 2012 when twitter and reddit were both betting on open-everything.

the early branches that worked were small. somebody asked a question, four or five people who actually had something to say answered, the resulting thread read like an edited transcript. the format was used for a memorable thread between alexis madrigal, anil dash and a few others about the state of online community in '13. there were a handful of similar threads from media-twitter people that briefly made the format look like the future.

in fairness it scaled poorly. the user base was the brooklyn-manhattan-bay-area writer set and a few academics. growth stalled by mid '13. potluck, the recipe site, was an attempt to use the same invited-contributor model for cooking and never grew past a small private alpha. the facebook deal was the exit before either product had figured out how to grow.

~ the day it died ~

miller posted the closure note on the branch blog on june 3 2015, eighteen months after the facebook deal. the note was short. branch and potluck would no longer be available. data export was offered for users who wanted their threads. for whatever reason, that was the entire announcement. by then most active users had drifted away anyway, the user count had peaked in '13 and never climbed back.

the rooms project miller had been running at facebook had also stopped getting attention from above. miller left facebook for the white house director of product role two months after closing branch. the rooms app itself shut six months after that. nothing branch had built shipped at facebook in a form anybody noticed. the deal was an acqui-hire in the pure sense.

the branch.com domain currently redirects nowhere useful, the sister potluck.it domain was sold years ago. miller went on to cofound the browser company in 2019 after leaving the obama administration. that is a separate story. the lineage from branch through facebook rooms to whatever came next runs through one person.

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