Biz Stone Launches Q&A App Jelly

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone along with a seven-person startup, has launched a question-and-answer style mobile social networking app called Jelly, available for free for iOS and Android users.

Jelly enables users of submitting questions with an attached photo captured from their smartphone camera, which will become available for their Facebook and Twitter connections to then respond to via the app with a link, a drawing on the original picture, or simply a text. Questions can also be forwarded via text message.

“In a world where 140 characters is considered a maximum length, a picture really is worth a thousand words,” Stone wrote in a post on Jelly’s blog. “Images are in the foreground of the Jelly experience because they add depth and context to any question.

Born out of a passion for helping people, Stone believes that Jelly is capable of making an act of kindness relatively simple. Stone got the idea for Jelly with cofounder Ben Finkel, cofounder of Fluther, another question-and-answer service that Twitter acquired in December 2010.

The “Finkel Rank” displays questions to the most relevant audience of a user’s social connections and is expected to improve over time as the application gathers more user data and should help improve Jelly’s functionality.

The app’s name was inspired by jellyfish, which have “a loose network of nerves that act as a ‘brain’ similar to the way we envision loosely distributed networks of people coordinating via Jelly to help each other,” Stone wrote in the blog post.

Links:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jelly/id685652528

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jellyhq.starfish