Today, Obvious announced our partnership with Branch, makers of this fine conversational Internet product: obvious.com

We're still in early beta, but we wanted to invite some folks to try it out and ask any questions. Thanks.

We're thrilled to be announcing our partnership with the Obvious Corporation, and seed round of financing.

I've written about it here: bulletin.branch.com – and Ev and I would be happy to answer any questions in this conversation.

hi guys. how do you see the competitive landscape around this? seems like several companies have tried to do closed, high-brow conversations as a reaction to mass communities that don't scale. none of them seem to catch on. thinking of things like gather and that one in so. cal now that i have used so infrequently i can even remember the name of it.

Thanks, Sarah. Good to e-meet you! I spoke with Brian (Namesake) and Cody (Nerd Collider) months ago, and learned a lot about the hurdles they faced. One way we're different: we're focusing on the interaction between participants, not the interaction between participants and viewers.

But the starting point for us is this: every other publishing platform is centered around monologues, the conversation is always secondary. That doesn't seem right to us. So we're flipping that dynamic on its head.

What do you see as the relationship between these conversations and the wider social sphere ?

We see a relationship between these conversations and not just the wider social sphere but the wider media sphere. We have news, and we have have commentary about the news—both short form and long. What Branch provides, in a sense, is the chance to overhear the cocktail party back-and-forth among people who have unique and interesting perspectives about events of the day—people whom you likely don't know. This is something different and complimentary to both news and social spaces.

More specifically, we see these conversations being spawned by both news stories and social platforms. I could easily see starting a Branch based on a tweet.

Anil Dash's Branch is my favorite thus far: beta.branch.com