MANILA, Philippines – Facebook’s latest acquisition hints at the social networking giant’s priorities for 2014.
The company on Monday, January 13, acquired link sharing & social conversations platform Branch and plans to use the 9-man team’s experience to form a Facebook Conversation’s group.
The announcement came via Branch co-founder Josh Miller on Facebook. Miller says the goal of the new group is to help “people (on Facebook) connect with others around their interests.”
Facebook confirmed the acquisition but is mum on the exact terms. The Verge reports the acquisition came with a $15M price tag.
Branch is an online based platform that allows users to start conversations around topics or articles they find on the web. In early 2013, Branch launched Potluck for iOS. The app, as its name implies, is about coming together to share articles worth discussing and taking the conversation onto a more contextual space.
While link sharing has thrived on social networks like Twitter, there is an apparent platform-specific weakness that makes conversations hard to keep track of, because of its linear nature. Miller explains, “scale is the enemy of intimacy.”
Last December in a Medium.com article titled Musings About Text Boxes, Miller proposed that Facebook’s next steps should be about building a product that will leverage the social network’s “scale and data,” a standalone app or an evolution of Newsfeed that will become a “personalized television channel and newspaper – to own the news part of Newsfeed.”
It appears Facebook may have taken him up on that offer.
Miller says Branch and Potluck will continue to live on as standalone products. – Rappler.com
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