Facebook acquires link-sharing service Branch and chat app Potluck

Facebook has acquired yet another company. Link sharing service Branch and its sister service Potluck will be joining the social networking website for an undisclosed sum. However, The Verge has reported that the figure could be $15 million. In a post on Facebook , Josh Miller, Co-Founder of Branch and Potluck announced that he and his team will be joining Facebook but remaining in New York City. The team will be forming Facebook’s Conversations group, which seems to be an intriguing idea in itself. He reveals that Facebook’s pitch to the company was to “build Branch at Facebook scale”. “Although the products we build will be reminiscent of Branch and Potluck, those services will live on outside of Facebook,” Miller wrote in his post, while revealing he made this announcement while in vacation on Japan. Branch essentially is a web-based link sharing service that worked around trying to move conversations about news to a more contextual space. Till a while ago, this also meant moving conversation out of Facebook. Given the social networking website’s wish to make the News Feed throw up a lot more relevant material, it seems fairly obvious that the team has its job cut out for it. Potluck is an iOS app that lets you find out trending topics to chat about with friends. Interestingly, Branch has a Twitter connection too. The company was incubated under the care of Obvious Corp, a company started by Facebook’s arch rivals, Twitter’s co founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams. Facebook recently picked up Indian tech startup Little Eye Labs too for a reported sum in the vicinity of $10 million to $15 million. The year old startup based out of Bangalore, India, was built to help developers analyse app performance as well as to give them monitoring tools for Android based applications. Unlike the Branch and Potluck team, Little Eye Labs’ team was packing up its bags and heading to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.