Here we go again. A while ago I blogged about how stupid this "new invention" called Branch is because there is actually nothing new about it. Dude, you freakin’ invented forums, which have been around for over 10 years. Now, we have an article in The New York Times about how Cindy Gallop just invented the realm of amateur porn sites. This is freakin’ ridiculous. Another "brand new" thing that’s been around for ten years.
Coming soon: The invention of the computer mouse.
The Latest Web Start-Up That is Not Needed & Doomed to Fail
My inaugural post was about a new web start-up named Branch. Yesterday evening I was watching the Bloomberg Business cable channel when they had an interview with one of the co-founders of Branch. Unfortunately, my Hauppauge WinTV software wasn’t working, so I couldn’t get a direct digital video, so I resorted to an analog recording by putting the camera in front of my TV. It still came out ok, You can see it at the end of this post.
Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the co-founders of Twitter are backing Branch, which is probably why they are getting so much media coverage for such a stupid idea. Evan Williams was also the co-founder of Blogger, which never made any money, lost all of it’s employees, and nearly went out of business before he lucked out when Google bought Blogger in February 2003 for an undisclosed (probably ridiculously huge) sum.
We don’t really know if Twitter is profitable since they are still privately owned, but the rumors from supposedly leaked data, reported on Gawker aren’t surprising.
Bloomberg interviewed Josh Miller, who dropped out of Princeton to co-found Branch. He says he would read a newspaper and felt he had nowhere to express his opinion. Really? Apparently, he couldn’t figure out how to blog, participate in forums, post on Facebook, or Tweet. Josh states; "We’re trying to replicate the types of conversations that happen in the real world, online."
Whoa! Like that’s totally never been done before.
Define Irony: A guy that makes a decent living on the Internet that also thinks 90% of the Internet is colossally retarded.
I’ve had this domain for 5-years, since 2007, but I have only used it for email until now. I have finally decided to be a "blogger" even though I think it is ridiculous to say that you are a blogger—like when someone says, "What do you do?" and you say, "I’m a blogger", I think really!?!? Are you effen kidding me? I’ll have more on the stupidity of blogging later. What actually inspired me to finally just set up a personal blog—well, it was 2 or 3 things, but the final straw that broke the camel’s back was reading about this new website named Branch in today’s New York Times.
I finally found something so completely idiotic that I just … I just … *twitch* *twitch* couldn’t contain myself any longer. I have a ton of real work to do today, and I really shouldn’t be wasting time on this crap, but Jesus!
In the future, I promise to tell you the myriad reasons why I think Facebook, Twitter, Social Media, and Social Media Marketing are really, really freakin’ dumb (and why I use them all for my own purposes anyway), but today, I’m just going to make a brief, simple commentary on this new website that is such an amazing breakthrough that it warrants coverage in The New York Times. (The NYT is one of my favorite daily reads by the way, in digital format—yeah, I pay the 15 bucks a month. You’re welcome NYT.)
Ok, so here it is. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? … ’cause this is gonna blow you away. Up until now, we have never been able to have a group discussion online. (That is of course, excluding Forums, Blogs, Chat Rooms, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and back in the old days, Usenet.)