Potluck Is A Link-Sharing Service for Internet Lurkers to Become Sharers
The team behind Branch, launched a brand new product today called Potluck. Potluck is a new web service that lets you easily share links to all kinds of content such as blog posts, videos, music, etc without the pressure of worrying whether or not you will get a bunch of retweets or likes. By removing that anxiety level as well as some other factors, the Branch/Potluck team hopes to help people find more content that they enjoy.
“We reduced this anxiety by taking the emphasis off of individual people and placing it on the common interests that bring them together,” said Josh Miller, founder and CEO of Branch, in a blog post announcing the launch. “In your Friend Activity feed, the default view, you’ll notice that items don’t tell you who shared them — there are no names and no avatars,” he went on to say. If you decide to click on a link, it’s then and only then that you discover who else is there.
“Eighty-six percent of the Internet has not written a tweet or a blog post before, and doesn’t really want to,” Miller explains, citing data from Pew Research.
And that is exactly who Potluck is targeting. Potluck has been designed with those people in mind, it’s single push button publishing means you don’t even have type a single word to share a link. Simply copy and paste a link into Potluck and it will automatically gather all of the details such as page title and even an excerpt of the content on the page. Potluck will even directly embed YouTube videos within the page so users don’t have to click-through to watch.
Potluck also utilizes some of the technology from Branch, the built-in discussion system, allows users to comment and discuss on shared links with each other.
During its private beta, Potluck’s 1,000 beta testers spent on average 10 minutes on the site sharing links and engaging in conversations. That’s a lot of time, not bad at all. Hopefully they can replicate that with the official release.
The service’s ultimate goal is to turn the Internet’s lurkers into sharers. “What Branch, the company, cares about is conversations. That’s what we’re driven by,” says Miller. “The whole reason we took the time to even focus on Potluck, is because we really do want to empower the people who are not having conversations to have conversations.”
You can sign-up for Potluck today. The iOS app should be available within the next few weeks.