Branch wrote in a blog post that while the company is working to improve the features surrounding commenting, users asked for a cleaner, simpler version, and the company is complying:

“Over the last few months, we’ve spent time adding features to this simple tool: features like groups, a notification drawer, ask-to-join, and ‘branching.’ But we’ve also spent time listening, and when we did, we heard that while these features make having conversations easier and more delightful, they also make Branch more complicated. And that’s the last thing we wanted to do.

So starting today, you’ll find a simpler http://www.branch.com.

Just like before, you can start a branch, add people to it, and talk to each other. You can also still take your conversation and put it anywhere: embed it on a website, share it on Twitter or Facebook, or link to it in an email. What you won’t find is a complex notification system, groups architecture, ask-to-join process, or a way to “branch” individual posts. (But don’t worry! All your content is safe and sound.)”

When Branch was still in private beta in July 2012, cofounder Josh Miller explained to GigaOM that he envisioned Branch evolving to become more like Google Wave, but with some key differences. He’ll be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17.

“I think the promise of Google Wave is really interesting. Ultimately, it was too complicated a product,” Miller said at the time. “We’re focused on offering a very simple user experience. We’re really interested in the portability of conversations.”

When Twitter first released its new API rules in August — and changed what had been guidelines into hard-and-fast requirements about the way tweets are displayed, among other things — the company specifically said that Storify was an example of a service that added value to Twitter in a useful way, and therefore wasn’t at risk of being shut down or restricted like some other applications. Although the infamous “quadrant of death” graph that was published around this time made it seem as though Storify could be caught by the new restrictions, director of platform Ryan Sarver said that Storify was safe.

When I dropped in on co-founders Burt Herman and Xavier Damman recently in San Francisco and asked them about the potential for future conflict with Twitter, they said they were happy that the company had highlighted them as adding value, but both still seemed somewhat uneasy about the future — although Damman’s earlier response to a similar question (asked on Twitter, of course) shows that he sees any competition from the company as a challenge rather than a disaster:

@mathewi we can’t wait. Ask @foursquare what they think of @facebook entering the check-in space. It can only make us stronger. #ona12

—
Xavier Damman (@xdamman) September 22, 2012

Trying to become less reliant on Twitter’s API

I asked Herman about both of these potential issues in a follow-up phone interview — an audio recording of which is embedded below — and he said Storify believes that it is doing something very different from what Twitter might do if and when it offers curation tools, and that it is also about much more than just a way to curate tweets. Herman also said that the company is working on making it easier for users to pull in tweets without having to go through the Twitter API, and that it sees tweets as public information it should be able to gather however it wants to:

“It’s certainly Twitter’s right to do what they want to with their API, and so the more sustainable solution for a company is to figure out ways of doing what they need without using the Twitter API… We don’t want to be reliant on anybody — we want to be the place where you can collect public quotes from any service on the web [so] we’re hoping to make that easier and at the same time not be dependent on anyone’s API.”

That kind of reluctance to integrate too much with Twitter is probably the single biggest negative outcome from the company’s recent changes. For startups like Storify, deciding where to focus their energy is an important task, and the uncertainty around what Twitter might do in the future makes it difficult to know how to proceed. If it could change its mind so suddenly about which apps or services it should support, what would stop it from doing so again?

So one risk for Storify is the potential for unknown future changes to Twitter’s API rules that would leave the service — and its users — hanging, and force the company to either turn off some features or restructure the way it does things in order to get onside.

Storify wants to curate more than just Twitter

A related issue is that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has talked about how the company wants to offer journalists and media organizations tools that will help them curate tweets more easily, the way that Twitter has been doing for its media partners during official events such as the Summer Olympics or the federal election. That sounds an awful lot like what Storify does. But Herman says he isn’t concerned:

“We’re not just tied to Twitter — we really want to be a curation tool for all of the social web, and that includes Instagram and Facebook and Tumblr and YouTube and Flickr and Vimeo and whatever else comes along… it is true that Twitter is a great source of real-time information, but there’s definitely more out there.”

Herman also noted that Twitter’s recent attempts at curation for specific events such as the Summer Olympics and NASCAR seemed to be more devoted to a real-time or social TV experience, and that Storify sees a big part of its value as being the ability to highlight content after an event. “We’re used for real time too, but we’re also about being a record of something that is lasting, not just a reaction in the moment,” he said. “So these are the best things people are saying or photos that are being posted about the topic — things that stand for more than just the second you happen to glance by.”

The Storify founder said that a large proportion of the content within the service still comes from Twitter — perhaps in part because tweets are so short that it’s easy to include a lot of them in a Storify module, whereas people likely wouldn’t include dozens of videos or photos. But it’s also true that the real-time nature of the Twitter stream and the speed with which it flows by is one of the main reasons why curation tools like Storify are so necessary, and that makes it feel as though the two services are joined at the hip. Whether Herman and Damman can successfully separate them remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Umberto Salvagnin

That’s why Storyful, a service that partners with media companies to aggregate and verify news from social networks, says it has decided to open up its formerly private Twitter account to help crowdsource the distribution and verification of breaking news reports.

Before he started the company in 2010, Storyful’s founder Mark Little was a foreign correspondent for a number of outlets such as Ireland’s Raidió Teilifís Éireann — much like Burt Herman, a former Associated Press reporter who started a company with a somewhat similar name: Storify. But while Storify is designed as a tool that anyone can use to pull together or “curate” a social-media stream from sources like Twitter and Flickr, the idea behind Storyful was to build a professional service staffed by journalists who could track breaking news reports through social networks and help media companies verify them. The company has a staff of 33 editors working in dozens of countries, and works with a number of outlets such as the New York Times and Reuters.

Collaboration is becoming a key journalistic skill

As part of its service, Storyful had a private Twitter account called StoryfulPro, which collected and distributed breaking news reports from both its own team and the various sources they monitored within their countries or their fields of expertise — including both professional journalists and citizen reporters, or what the company likes to call “networked journalists.” The primary audience for the account was over 1,000 professional journalists that Storyful had worked with before. On Tuesday, Little announced that the service had decided to make the Pro account public, allowing anyone to use or contribute to the process.

In a blog post, the Storyful founder said he decided to do this because he believes crowdsourcing is the best way to determine the truth of a breaking news report as quickly as possible. As he puts it:

“Storyful believes the key skill for journalists in a social age is collaboration. There really is no alternative to working with others in the Golden Hour. If a newsroom decides to go it alone, the chance you will be consistently first is nonexistent. The chance that you will often be wrong is 100 percent.”

As we’ve seen in a number of recent cases — including the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo. and the death by suicide of director Tony Scott — the pressure on media outlets of all kinds to break news first can result in a profusion of incorrect reports, which then get redistributed through Twitter and other social networks faster than any correction or clarification can match. Little’s phrase “the golden hour” refers to the first hour after a news event occurs, which Storyful believes is the most crucial period for fact-checking, and he says one of the most important contributions that can be made is when someone — either a professional journalist or reliable source — kills a false report before it can spread. Says Little:

“Breaking news now emerges in a ‘Golden Hour’, when skilled intervention is most valuable, when a celebrity death starts to trend on Twitter or an explosive video goes viral on YouTube. In this Golden Hour, the best journalists are often the ones who STOP a story, not start it.”

Crowdsourced news verification is almost always better

Storyful isn’t the only company or media-related startup that is trying to bring some kind of professional rigor to the process of real-time news verification: the NBC project Breaking News, which started as a Twitter account, also has a growing team that curates and distributes real-time news it has verified, and Sulia develops Twitter lists of credible sources (both professional and amateur) around various topics and breaking news events. Some media outlets also have their own internal teams that do this, such as the BBC’s “user-generated content desk,” which verifies reports from social media for use by BBC reporters.

I’ve argued before that one of the most compelling examples of crowdsourced news verification is the way that Andy Carvin of National Public Radio used his Twitter account as a real-time newswire — or what he prefers to call a public newsroom — to filter and verify reports coming out of Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, something other media outlets should emulate. And in a recent post, I also tried to make the case that this kind of verification or fact-checking is almost always better when it is done in public (although many readers seem to disagree with me on that).

One of the reasons for that is the amount of knowledge that can exist in what journalism professor Jay Rosen has called “the people formerly known as the audience.” Little says in his post that the company’s golden rule is that there is always someone closer to the story — and in many cases that person is not a traditional journalist or mainstream news source:

“Often, the closest person is still the wire reporter or networked journalist. But rarely do we rank the key source on the basis of authority and power. Authority has been replaced by authenticity as the currency of social journalism.”

Little says the closed nature of the Storyful Pro account always troubled him, because of his belief that crowdsourcing is almost always a better route to take for fact-checking the news (something he has written about in the past for the Nieman Foundation) and that’s why the decision was made to open it up. I’m glad the company decided to do so as well, because the more services and networks and media outlets there are trying to do this — whether it’s Storyful or Sulia or Breaking News or even Wikipedia — the better off we will all be as news consumers.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and Petteri Sulonen

Hardlink to page here.

The platform remains in private beta, although the company says that the number of invites it sends out will accelerate; in recent days, it’s also been handing out some invites to encourage people to use the service to share the story of the ongoing Egyptian Revolution (See an example here).

In its announcement of the funding, Storify refers generally to new features on the way, as well as plans to hire additional employees.