Hey guys! Thanks for being such awesome members of Branch :) I've been responding to you guys on twitter as @Branch for a few days.

I'd actually love to hear what would make you compulsively visit *Branch* daily. We still have a lot to build and are trying to talk to our users as much as possible about what they'd like to see on Branch. Specifically, there is very little discovery on the site currently (analogous to Twitter's stream or Facebook's Newsfeed, etc.), and we built branch.com/featured as a hack to bridge the gap between now and when we build discovery for real.

What do you want to see?

Ha! I just blogged about this, like a minute ago.

tl;dr version: at present I'm into the line Branch is straddling between public and private. I'd actually like to see both better search AND private rooms.

Nice! Just read it. You're totally on the right track.

We're doing a lot of thinking about the right way to surface interesting branches — and what "interesting" means for us (Friends? Topics? Both?). The idea of private branches has definitely been raised, too.

In your head, when you log into Branch, what do you want it to look like? What would make Branch a must have?

Hmm... I want to know what my current branches are up to... maybe what my friends are up to-- or at least a subset of my friends who I am most active with... heck, not even friends... just the people I talk to the most.

I'd like to know if I've been mentioned in a post-- is there a protocol for linking a twitter handle/branch account that I haven't grok'd yet?

I want to track some topics. And be able to flip through these views like perspectives. Maybe in tab form?

Hope that wasn't too disjointed. Just brainstorming here.

Not too disjointed at all! Everything is super helpful :)

There is no feature for @mentioning people, but it's something that happens a lot naturally so we'd like to find a way to build it in, we think.

In terms of your "track some topics" — could you list a few examples? Do you envision those changing frequently or staying mostly the same?

Do you have any quirky, hacky things you do to services you use now like Facebook or Twitter or Google Reader that allow you to view it how *you* want? I'd love to hear about 'em if so.

Okay... I'll stop interrogating you now ;)

I wish I had hacky things for Facebook, which just feels like the beast that will not die. Everytime I figure it out they change it. Managing the Turnstyle brand page is a pain in the ass because of that.

For Twitter I live in Tweetbot. Use the mute features all the time, and rely on the conversation views and integration with Pinboard. I wish I could tie BOTH my Pinboard and my Instapaper accounts to Tweetbot as opposed to having to chose just one.

Google Reader I abandoned, but back in the day I used it with NetNewsWire's smart features to run RSS searches that let me surface articles on specific topics by writers I actually cared about. Funneling the cream of the crop to my inbox.

It sometimes worked.

I'm a big geek for being able to like, +1 etc individual comments (aka positively promote). Is there a way to introduce being able to follow a thread? (similar to what Quora does with main questions).

Agree on being able to mute threads (like on G+ where you can comment, see if it gets crazy and then mute the whole thread)

Just thought of this: if the notification emails let me acknowledge that I'd read them and made note of that in my inbox I'd like them more.

Noah - Interesting! What's a typical scenario for how you use the mute feature in Tweetbot? We've heard tons of good things about NetNewsWire — although very few of us on the team ever actually used it. The idea of smart searches could potentially be cool for us, though... Almost like an IFTTT for filtering?

And re: status tracking notifications from email to Branch — that would be awesome (not just for Branch!), but as far as I know it has to do with the fact that email is sort of a walled garden, which makes it technically impossible. :(

Re: email- even if there was an HTML link that you could click to mark it read? I'm no coder, so I have no idea if that would work.

IFTTT for filtering: YES.

Tweetbot mute triggers: a massive burst of self-promotion, a constant flow of updates from an event I just don't care about. The litmus test: are they posting about something that I either don't care about or angers me at a high enough volume that it overwhelms the rest of the feed.

I don't see that as being applicable to Branch, necessarily.