We analyse Medium and Branch, what has happened in last 10 years?

Williams and Biz Stone were two of the founders of Twitter and, at the time, the creators of Blogger. Currently part of The Obvious Corporation, a company that aims to go one step further in social networks.

At the time they were part of The Obvious Corporation, a company that aims to go one step further in social networking. Thanks to the experience gained in recent years of seeing how people interacted with social networks such as Google +, Facebook or Twitter and their ambition to adapt them to the needs of how people lived in 2014, led them to create two new social networks that promised much joy: Medium and Branch.

Medium: high-quality content

Launched in August 2012, it was a publishing platform that was organised into collections of topics, whether discussion or photography, for example. Readers, depending on their level of involvement, could create new topic collections and generate content, or simply read or rate it. The topics could be open or closed and had a structure very similar to that of a blog, the object of Medium being the generation of quality content. At first glance, it looks like a mixture of tumblr and pinterest. It should be noted about Medium, the taste for design, as special importance was given to the use of templates and good designs in publications that facilitate reading and that users spend a lot of time on the social network.

Medium's platform is currently changing the way people interact with online content. Through its algorithm, Medium prioritises high-quality content and provides readers with a personalised experience. This has created an ecosystem where authors can get better visibility and rewards for their work.

Branch and intelligent conversations

The social network Branch is the other project that promised much joy for social network users. Also launched in the middle of August 2012, it aimed to move from the usual monologues on the web to dialogue. It worked through the creation of conversation topics, as well as the pinterest-style addition of multimedia elements such as posts, videos, links, tweets, etc. to the conversation.

The social network worked as the name implies, by branches, in the style of the old forums, allowing people to create discussion topics and discussion subtopics, and everyone adds themselves to the one they want. Branch calls it "intelligent conversations" and allowed users to start discussion topics and then invite other users to join the conversation. The idea was to boost dialogue around complex topics, allowing multiple people to participate and share their views.

Today, in 2022, Medium is a social network that has established itself primarily as a content platform for writers and thinkers. Unfortunately, although Medium has been staying active, its success is limited and it has not managed to catch up with popular social networks such as Facebook and Instagram. On the other hand, Branch, sadly, no longer exists.